Lego Victory

It has taken me months, but I have achieved a major Lego Victory! Last spring Kara scored 57 pounds of Legos on Craig's List. Included with the Legos was lots of nonLego junk: marbles, toy cars, toy soldiers, coins, dead AA batteries, polished rocks, unpolished rocks, plastic beads, dust bunnies, candy, broken crayons, colored pencils, scrap paper, rubberbands, etc. Also in the mix were some fake Legos (Megabloks). I'm a purist so the fake Legos needed to be sorted out and discarded.

When the boxes first came into the house, they were put on the kitchen floor. The children enjoyed looking through them for a half hour. I looked through a couple of boxes and saw that it was going to be a major project sorting and cleaning the Legos before they could be added to the children's Legos. I carried the boxes downstairs and set up a sorting station. I diligently worked on the project for a week or two while I listened to TV. Then I came to my senses. This wasn't fun. It was a nasty job. I took the boxes to the guest bedroom and stashed them. Months passed and no one asked about them. 

At the beginning of summer I cleaned out the craft room and moved the boxes to the garage. There they sat waiting and waiting. Kara started cleaning out the garage in preparation for winter: the Lego boxes had run out of places to hide. It was time to get serious about sorting them because they could have no true home until they were sorted and cleaned.

The sorting process was time consuming. Each Lego piece had to be carefully examined to determine if was the genuine article or a fake Lego. (99% of the time the word Lego is somewhere on an authentic Lego piece. It might take a magnifying glass to find it, but it's there.) After ascertaining its authenticity, a piece was then placed into one of the following bins/bags: garbage; treasures (nonLego); treasures (unusual Lego pieces); small pieces; minifigures; older, weird Legos; super dirty Legos; unsure if it's a Lego (consult Matt); larger sized Legos; Hero Factory Lego pieces; and finally all other Legos (a very big bin). There were thousands and thousands of pieces to be examined, so I recruited help.

Bentley, Jake and Viva were the obvious solution. They have good eyes and they were the primary beneficiaries of this project. They didn't like doing it and they whined about doing it, but I didn't like doing it either, so I kept cracking the whip.

How many hours did we put in? It's hard to say for sure. It seemed like a hundred...but it wasn't. Jake and Viva had a tendency to get distracted by interesting finds, but after a few reminders they got in the groove and picked up their pace and then I had three good helpers. The trio worked with me four or five times for twenty to forty minutes, so they put in maybe two and half hours each. I had done a third of the work before I drafted the trio and I put in a couple more work sessions on my own, so I put in at least fifteen more hours. After the sorting, I had to clean them all. Here's what we ended up with:

What do you think I could sell cleaned and sorted Legos for on ebay.com? I checked sold auctions and 25 pounds of used Legos sell for around $175. After discarding all the nonLego junk, there was 45 pounds of Legos. If we got $7/pound, we'd receive $315. I think Kara paid $50, so that leaves us $265 in exchange for our labor. That's $10.60/hour. The children would be happy with that wage, but I'm not going to be repeating this experience. I'd rather quilt or read. (Viva, too, would most likely choose reading over earning $10.60/hour sorting Legos.)