It’s been amazing to go online and find any instruction and re-assemble these kits.
It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.
What! That is the best part!
Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.
In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.
I was probably 8 or 9. From that point on, fuck it, they all go in one big box. My brothers and I would compete to see who could find the most valuable pieces. Mostly treasure chest coins, little gems, and basically anything translucent qualified - transparent single stud pieces, cone pieces, and lightsaber beams were very high value, since one could not build a respectable Lego sci-fi arsenal without all of them.
He is very fortunate to be part of a reasonably affluent family, so he had like 6 60-liter boxes full of assorted Lego.
We would spill a couple at a time (who am I kidding we spilled all of them) on the floor, when the flow of pieces stopped, the game was on! So many arguments about the nature of the simple shapes, like "oh no this isn't a blue lightsaber, it is a cylinder of pure diamond!"
When I built Titantic last year (first Lego I'd done in maybe 30 years) it was split out over dozens of small bags, and all the parts you'd need for one section would be in that one bag with no more than, say, 200 pieces in it. Often there's be a smaller bag inside for holding the 1x1 stuff.
So I built the whole thing with two tupperware containers..one decent size square "bowl" and s much smaller one for the tiny stuff.
Killed a month off and on putting that thing together. I was recovering from foot surgery so stuck in bed.
Luckily, the Titanic actually builds as 6 sections, with 3 pairs that join more or less permanently, while there are then a couple of pins and rods that hold the whole thing together (along with a rather clever tensioning gear... the main lines are there as strings, and do hang in a true catenary. )
So each of the 6 sections I basically built on a hardback book.
A few build pics:
Made for a very doable build, even given pretty hefty physical limitations.
Anyway like I said, we definitely always built the kit per the instructions first, it's just that the impulse to keep a TIE fighter a TIE fighter was never stronger than the impulse to build something new.
I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.
Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.
(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)
You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch
She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.
Also some the ones she's playing with are currently over 30 years old and still going.
Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.
My friend, let me introduce you to this Spotify playlist: LEGO White Noise [1]
[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/6qZUya0mkucuxvoIp4akVT?si=RgH...
There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.
The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.
It's a bit of work but I found enjoyment in sorting my old childhood Lego. Don't do colors, do categories (bricks, slopes, plates, etc). Once done, I could complete my old childhood models even faster than the unsorted ones you buy new. It also lowers the threshold to break it down and build something else since it's so easy to find the parts. On the downside, it takes more space than a single bin.
Are you NUTS?
Are you trying to shame my 1980s values with LEGO?
"I KNOW that FN piece is in here!!!! I JUST SAW IT!!!!"
You're robbing your kids of a life lesson. and better image recognition, memory, sorting processing thoughts, etc.
There are so many lessons embedded in working with LEGO that can only be learnt through the frustration of a F-ton of brix in a bin and your looking for that specific 1x2 -- or worse yet, 1x1 smooth piece.
I used to buy things in bulk from LEGO at the mall in San Jose and just have bins of smooth pieces and other were parts...
Lego is by default the foundationaly builing block.
I HATE custom pieces to a lego set.
My guess is that is why techies keep inventing their own Lego sorting machines
I guess that's for people who have a specific thing in mind that they wanted to build. I find a lot fun just picking out random pieces and then thinking about where to attach them afterwards.
I would just like to pay once for an app that 100% offline scans for blocks. Let me pick an instruction book and begin pointing out pieces to me that belong in the set.
Fingers crossed.
Also helps him learn to adjust on the fly, which is a great thing to learn at a young age.
More recently, I also got out my old boxes of Knex, which I'd put away a decade ago by sorting the parts by color into about a dozen quart-size ziploc bags (there are far fewer variants of Knex than of Lego, even ignoring the myriad custom tiles and stickers). He was THRILLED to have them all sorted, and for more than a month now - probably a dozen sessions of use - has put them back in the right bags. It's like pulling teeth to get him to keep his art supplies organized, those can just be piled in a heap, it can take two hours for him to do his laundry, typical playtime with friends is an explosion of toys from bins, but it is critical that the Knex go in the right bag even during use.
After seeing that, I got a compartmentalized organizer that used to hold fishing tackle, dumped all the tackle in the big tackle box, and washed it, and he has been keeping "the good Legos" in that. If you're curious, it turns out that the good Lego are the wheels, propellers, blocks with pins to connect to those wheels and propellers, the Technik couplers, the Ninjago transparent flames, especially the Ninjago spring-loaded bolt gun thing, and the Minecraft character heads Not the character bodies, not the Iron Man head, not even the ones that look like him and Mom and Dad, just Minecraft heads - everything else can go in the bin. I think he made a good selection, builds just seem to go together faster when those parts are available. In particular he used to need help on occasion to find the right wheels - everything seems to need wheels - and now he has them.
God I hope he's more organized and tidy than me.