One of My Favorite Things

Being an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) has its pros and cons.  On the positive side, you have your own money and can buy whatever LEGOs you want, whenever you want.  This assumes you have an understanding spouse or significant other ;)  On the negative side, you end up with a whole lot of LEGOs, and you have to keep them somewhere.

I don't know if all AFOLs are neurotic or not, but I think it probably helps.  I can't imagine keeping our LEGOs in one monstrous, disorganized pile.  No, they must be sorted.  Some other time I might share pictures of what our LEGO room looks like.  (Yes, it's a room.  Sort of.)

For now, I'll share with you a product we found and love.  (I have no affiliation with this product or company.  I'm just a happy customer!)  We used to keep our minifigs in plastic bags sorted by theme.  It looked like this:

It did the job.  But those minifigs are just so darn cute, and it isn't much fun to look at them this way (and also not so easy to find that one character you're looking for).  Another one of my hobbies is scrapbooking, and that's how I found....the Scraponizer!

Scraponizers are these amazing 8.5" by 11" plastic cases.  You can get them with divided trays inside, like the one you see below.

The great part about these is that you can see everyone in there very easily, the Scraponizers are easy to stack on a shelf, and on the spine you can label them by theme.  Makes it super easy to find even one lowly mime amidst two dozen Crusaders.  (Not that the mime would be mixed in with the Crusaders.  *Shudder*.)

This certainly isn't the cheapest way to sort minifigs (especially when you have a ton), but it's very satisfying.  Searching around online I found a place to get them for about $4 apiece.  Warning:  If you try them, you may very well become addicted.  Especially if you are the sort of person who would never store a mime with Crusaders.

These cases are also child-friendly.  Our 7-year-old is able to look through the stack of Scraponizers and find exactly what he wants, instead of pestering us to find it for him.  We're still working on training him to put things away himself...

If you visit the Scraponizer website and look at their photo gallery you'll see pictures of them being used to store small LEGO collections.  And before we wrap this up, just a friendly reminder that we'll be back with Building Challenge #7 on Friday, so be sure to visit us then!