Editors Note: I linked here from an assignment for CS50. It's a wonderful free computer science course hosted by Harvard University. You should check it out!

I feel that it is important to start with Lego.

After all, that is where this whole story starts. There is a lot of Lego here. Not the insane collections that you see from the really large bricklink stores, but a respectable 100k+ part collection. The total volume of Lego has probably at least doubled since we really started serious sorting efforts in early 2016. Early efforts were fairly mismatched as you can see in the pictures below.

Before we continue, I need to refer you to the legendary "evolution of Lego sorting" post on the classic lugnet newsgroup. We had originally found the post a couple of years ago, and at the time could relate as far as about step 13. On revisiting the post today it turns out that Mr. Remy Evard in 2001 was basically a fortune teller. Our Lego sorting path has followed this list almost verbatim all the way through step 25 with terrifying accuracy. More on step 25 can be found here.

Back to the problem of sorting. We soon decided that it would simply not do to have a giant mishmash of different types of storage for the Lego. We needed standardization and rules; that is just the kind of people we are. We settled on the Sterilite 3-drawer wide units as the best for our purpose as we found the "lots of little tiny drawer" Stack-on style units just not versatile enough. There are lots of Lego parts that you cannot fit properly in the tiny drawers, further multiplying the types of storage required. At this point we had a decent sized collection of the Sterilite drawers, which worked well for large parts and large quantities, however we needed a way to sub-sort for smaller parts and amounts.

We ended up discovering that UltraPro 100ct clear deck boxes fit a dozen comfortably per drawer and make subsorting much less painful. They are also quite enjoyable to build out of because you can pull out just the boxes of stuff that you need and work from them right on your building surface.

As you may notice in some of these pictures, there are various different sets of labels on the drawers, but that is a story for another post as it involves the programming side a little more and I will save that one for Pete to write as it was his baby. (Note from Peter: It's in this articl

To get everything up to speed I will skip the year and a half of trial-and-error sorting and reorganizing up to Spring 2017 when Pete decided that the basement apartment he had been renting simply did not have the storage capacity for the amount of Lego coming in. So he bought a new house. For Lego. Moving all of the Lego was an experience and a half, but with the help of a large roll of industrial pallet-wrap we transported all of the towers of Lego safely to the new place and got the Lego creativity station set up. Here is a mostly up to date view of the current state of Lego storage.

I will stop boring you with ancient history now. I don't know if this is actually interesting to anyone outside those who have been along for the ride, but I feel that it is good to have a written and photographic history of our sorting progress from its earliest days. 

J