LEGO Organization

In the infancy of our Lego days, all Lego pieces were just dumped into one plastic tub, which was sorted through and dumped onto the floor as needed.  This worked fine when our collection was just miscellaneous pieces that OldestSon and MyGirl used to build any old creation that they could imagine.  Soon enough, LegoSon grew tired of his own tub of Duplo bricks and joined in the fun.  And then it was birthday time and LegoSon became the proud owner of a few boxed Lego sets, which I promptly built (he was 4) and LegoSon promptly took apart! That mixed collection of bricks quickly included all the pieces that I needed to rebuild the tow truck LegoSon took apart yesterday.  My eyes started blur and my back began to ache as I sat on the floor looking for the tiny pieces I needed to put LegoSon's truck back together.  And so I decided to sort our bricks by color.

Using containers I found around the house, LegoSon and I painstakingly sorted our bricks by color.  This was a fairly easy task and a great lesson in colors for my preschooler.  But when it came time to rebuild sets, I found it difficult to find that very specific piece I was looking for and ended up dumping out each container of bricks as I was searching.  It was just too difficult for my eye to discern the different shaped pieces when in a tub full of like-colored bricks.

So I invested the time to re-sort all the bricks into shape/form/function.  This was a much more detailed sort, but in the end it is worth the effort.  I bought several snap lock bins from Target, lined them up in a row, dumped out our collection, and started sorting.  Now, we have lots of bins, but it is (usually) soo much easier to pick out the particular color of brick whose tub you are looking in (ex. a red 2x4 is easier to find in a bin of mixed color 2x bricks than in a bin of all red pieces). 

Here's how we've sorted our bricks:

Small bins

Flat Tiles
Technic-type pieces

Medium bins

Small pieces (1x1s, flat rounds, etc)
All 1x bricks except 1x1s (1x2, 1x3, 1x4, 1x6, 1x8, etc)
All 2x bricks (2x2, 2x3, 2x4, etc)
All slope bricks
All round pieces
Wheels and axles
Windows, doors, castle walls, trees
Windshields, large wings

Large bins

All plates (from 1x2 to 32x32 baseplate)
Minifigures
Pieces waiting to be sorted (usually get put in here for quick cleanup)

It may not be a perfect system, but its the best one we've tried yet:)  What methods have you used for sorting and organizing your Lego collection?