Lego Storage Story, Part 3

Edit:  If you came here from Pinterest, IKEAhackers, Τεχνοτροπίες Και Διακόσμηση,  shelterness, or diys.com, welcome!  Thanks to your kindness, my little post has had over 11,000 visits.  I hope it gets your creative juices flowing!

Lego Storage Story, Part 1
Lego Storage Story, Part 2
Update

Finally, the end of the story!  We decided to take the plunge and buy a white IKEA Trofast frame that had enough slots to include nine small tubs.  I read up on spray-painting and decided to buy the white frame.  It's much less expensive than the natural wood one, and I needed to paint, no matter which color I bought.  (I will not go too far into the story of going to IKEA to buy these things with my mom and children, and finding that their online inventory check does not work and that the items I needed were not in stock.  Ahem.)  And I donated our old, well-loved coffee table.

It took a lot more time, primer, and paint than I expected to get the job done.  I sanded the pieces of the frame (because everything from IKEA comes unassembled!) and primed it, then sanded again and painted it.  It took multiple coats of black paint, but here it is after I assembled it.


Then I added the guides for the tubs...

White wasn't ideal, but the tubs were white, too, so I decided it wasn't a big deal.

And put in the tubs.


Here's a close-up of the labels on the tubs.  I took pictures of each color of Lego and then cut the letters out of the pictures.  I still have my alphabet punches that I use for scrapbooking.  I think the Cricut machine has put this kind of punch out of business, but I love mine and it was fun to find a new use for them.  I Mod Podged the letters onto each tub.


I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do to the top of the table.  Like the other furniture in our playroom, I want the kids to enjoy it now when they're young and not grow out of it when they're older.  I didn't want to worry about scratches on the tabletop, so I considered painting it with chalkboard paint (which I have read is easy to make yourself.)  Eventually I decided to put two big, gray baseplates on top.  The size (15x15) worked well with the size of the Trofast, and the gray color wasn't quite so loud as the green and blue 10x10 baseplates.  They're a bit pricey, but we already had one, so I just had to buy one more.  I didn't put them on permanently, but just put a few dots of sticky tack or poster putty or (what is it called??) on the back so that they don't scoot around.  The younger kids have used them a lot for Duplo building.  (I love that they're compatible with Duplos!)  We can take them off to play a board game or work a puzzle or...anything!

Jonathan and I were pretty excited about this system!  I was happy with its progress, and he was having a lot of fun building and designing when it was so easy to find his pieces.  They were easier to put away, too.  But I needed to finish the part of the plan that made the Legos less visually appealing to my toddler.

I planned to make flaps of fabric that would hang down over the Lego tubs.  There is just a bit of wood that hangs down above each top tub.  Can you see it?  I attached self-adhesive Velcro behind each of those pieces of wood and planned to sew Velcro on my fabric flaps, too, making them removable and replaceable.

I still had leftover fabric from my window seat project, and I had some fabric that would work for the backing as well.  I wanted the pattern to be exactly the same on each flap.  Measuring and figuring this out was a lot harder than I thought it would be.  And the print was not exactly on the grain, so my work is not perfect, but I won't point out the mistakes.  :)  It worked OK in the end.  I was happy that I didn't have to spend a penny on this part of the project.  I had all the Velcro, and even though I recently donated a bunch of fabric, I had saved my playroom remnants.  I'm so glad I did!

Here is what each flap looked like, before Velcro.

I realized after I started cutting, that a placemat or nice dish towel would have made a great flap with a lot less work.  I like these.  Oh, well, the ones I made were free, if very time-consuming.  It was very tricky to make rectangles the exact same size as each opening on the frame.  They're close enough.  :)

Here they are, attached with one lifted up.  The Velcro is hidden behind the wood.


And closed.  Without the baseplates attached, these look pretty grown-up and not too playroomish, right?


And here's the final Lego storage solution that we hope will work for our family for many, many years.  I felt such a sense of accomplishment after dreaming this up and completing the project!  Thank you, Pinterest, and thank you, iheartorganizing, for getting my creative juices flowing and helping me to learn to do something I hadn't considered before!


(PS:  A couple of things to add!
Our 10x10 baseplates just slide into this shelf under the tubs.  There is plenty of room.
We keep the Lego people and their stuff in a plastic tub in one of Jonathan's desk drawers, and all the Lego directions in a separate desk drawer.  Since we already had the desk set up for him, that works for us.
Benjamin has been staying out of the Legos!  He is just old enough to respond when I tell him not to lift up the flaps that cover the Legos.  A few months ago, it wouldn't have worked, but it does now. I am looking toward to the future, which will be here all too soon, when all the kids will be old enough to play with these and enjoy them together.)

Thank you, Jules, for posting our project on IKEA Hackers!