that four letter word ..... LEGO

I'm not sure how or when it started but Josh some time this year became OBSESSED with Lego. So obssessed that he got wind of the Lego website from his dad and would wake every morning and look at all the different sets you could get, watch the little video ad for them (which he memorised, I love hearing him muttering "each set sold separately"!) and made a list of all the ones he wanted. It finally got narrowed down to a few that we said some he could save pocket money for, and others he could get as Christmas presents. His favourite Lego was mostly Lego City police sets, but he has now branched out to Ninjago and Hero Factory Lego too. For Christmas he was lucky enough to get the Lego City Police Station (I got the last one on sale at Target!) and the Lego City Police Boat. These were added to his growing collection of the rest of the Lego City Police vehicles and figures. I think we worked out today that he now has all the sets in that Police category! Outrageous....

So now we have the problem of storage. Our house is not huge. We don't have a separate play area, nor are the kids bedrooms very big. At the moment Lego lives in just about every nook and cranny around here. On the top bunk in Josh's room, in several containers, lounge room coffee table. I set up a little table and chairs in his room to house the police station (see above) so it would be a good place to play with it too. Inevitably though, the sets get broken up and we end up with bits of the stuff everywhere. My latest threat is that if there is any on the floor that doesn't get picked up, it's getting sucked up by the vacuum cleaner (which lucky for him is not happening too often at the moment with my time taken up with a newborn!). I don't know where to start with organising how to store the stuff. When I was little, it all just went in the one big tub. But I didn't have a lot of 'sets', mainly just bricks and my imagination. Josh has lots of sets. We keep the instructions, so do I store each set in a ziploc bag with its instructions? Or do we just throw it all in one big tub and refer to the instructions when we want to rebuild? Or do we organise and store pieces by size and colour? What do you do with your Lego (besides moan and curse when you step on the damn pieces on the floor!)? I need some help with this from all the Lego experts out there!