New 52 | Week 20 (whoop whoop)

I have an obsessive compulsive husband – not clinically diagnosed or anything, he’s just a huge fan of systems and routines. And cleanliness. And order. I like to label it as OCD because I’m messed up ten ways towards the weekend and it makes me feel better to apply a label to my husband. I don’t complain about his rigid habits because let’s be honest, they benefit me in a lot of different ways. I have never once had to put a toilet seat down, random areas of the house miraculously become clean and organized without my knowledge, and I have never … EVER … lost a single sock since we started living together.

If Tom is on the obsessive compulsive spectrum, then Nicholas would be on whatever the opposite end of obsessive compulsive is.  Dispassionately Free, let’s call it. I have often spotted Tom standing in front of Nicholas’ closet, where bins upon bins of colorful Lego bricks are stored haphazardly. No particular rhyme or reason to their organization, no method to his madness. It’s a Lego free-for-all in there. Every brick for himself!

I would love if all of those bricks were categorized and sorted like a Lego Store right here in our very own home, but the reality is that when I look at those shelves a low, menacing voice in the back of my head mutters “Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here,” and I just shut those doors. It’s a project I should have started five years ago and kept on top of. At this point the boy owns hundreds of Lego sets – he may even be over a thousand now – and the enormity of this task makes my fingers hurt just thinking about it.

On Sunday afternoon, after I went through N’s closet to pull out all of the outgrown clothes to take to Goodwill, I found Tom in there shortly afterward opening bins of Legos and lining them up on the floor. Sometimes it’s just easier to roll with it. I could see his little (immaculate, perfectly aligned) wheels start turning.

One of my long-term goals for this year is to create some sense out of a few of our more chaotic areas here in the house. While we’re pretty neat and organized people in general we’ve let a few things go for a little too long. (Please reference: our furnace room, the corner of our basement and the guest room closet.) As of this weekend we had officially remedied all of those areas – go us! All that remained was the Lego catastrophe.

So we queued up two movies (Salt & The Bourne Identity), set out a bunch of empty plastic bins, and began sifting through the madness together.

My fingers haven’t hurt this badly in a long time. Tom dictated the organizational system: plates, bricks, wheels, slopes, wedges, one stud pieces, two stud pieces, Technic parts, clear/window pieces, etc. etc. etc. Then the plates bucket started to overflow, so he broke those down into three subcategories. We’re only about 75% of the way through this process so there’s no telling how far down the rabbit hole we may wind up going.

This is one of my favorite bins, though. Just minifigures and their accessories. Some of them are fully assembled, others are just a torso or a head. It cracks me up, this tub full of people.

We’re not total monsters, we didn’t take apart his fully assembled sets. He has quite a collection of sets that are favorites, either because of their size or their theme, and he leaves those assembled for the most part. Like this one, the full-sized Imperial Star Destroyer that he and Tom spent almost an entire day building:

I give him three long shelves in his closet purely for sets he wants to keep together. Once the shelves are full he has to sacrifice one to add a new one. It’s a cutthroat world, but if I didn’t implement this system this whole thing would get ridiculously out of hand.

He really packs them in there, though. He makes use of every square inch.

He keeps that full size AT-ST together, too. (I probably just labeled that incorrectly. Could be an AT-AT? Could be an AT&T? I don’t claim to be a Star Wars expert.)

I love the guy mowing the lawn on this one.

This house (the Lego Beach House, I believe) has a few tanks and a Blackhawk helicopter surrounding it. So this is apparently some of the nicest beachfront property in a warzone that you can own.

I had to share all of these pictures because N will totally lose it when he sees his creations are on the Internet.

We’re hoping that the newly organized bricks will make it easier for him to create masterpieces. He doesn’t build from kit instructions much anymore – once he takes apart a set he typically doesn’t rebuild it (although we keep all of the instruction booklets). He likes to find custom plans on the Lego websites and build them out of his own bricks, which is a hard thing to accomplish when you need tiny, specific pieces and are searching for them among two dozen tubs of complete chaos.

Getting him to KEEP them organized will be a completely different battle.

In the end, at least it will be another “someday” goal that I can cross off of my list.

About This Project

New52 is a project started by Christine and I that invites participants to live outside the box a little bit more and try things outside their comfort zone. I’m aiming for 52 straight weeks of New, but it’s 100% okay if you decide to participate only once in a while. New52 isn’t about making a life-altering change every week, it’s about keeping an open mind and embracing little changes in your life.

If you participate this week, please leave a link to your blog post, scrapbook page, photograph or other recorded history of your walk on the wild side in the link list below. You can also post images to our Flickr Group! We would love to see what you were inspired to do.