The streets of heaven are paved with gold Lego bricks

I have had a love affair with Lego since I was around 3-4 years old. I am now pushing 50 and I have recently rekindled this flame.

A little personal history, to put things in perspective. 

My father is a rocket scientist, an honest to goodness aeronautical engineer. I always thought this was a pretty cool thing to have in my family, but I also learned that it meant that engineering was in my blood. In my day job I am an operations engineer for technology. In short, I make things work with computers, either with networking, software, or even just technical processes. My job is to get to a fully operation battle station as quickly as possible. This requires a skill for organization and administration. A place for everything and everything in its place.

I have recently begun applying this to Lego. 

I had not really touched my personal bricks in a couple of decades. I had a few Star Wars sets that I picked up here and there and put together and enjoyed, but nothing really large. Recently, my mental health took a bit of a turn and when confiding with a dear friend he told me that he had been buying Lego bricks in bulk (by the pound) online. His belief was that the simple act of sorting the Lego bricks set off a dopamine kick every time he sorted as few as five bricks. I decided to try it out and bought twenty pounds of random Lego online and learned he was dead on.

I wish I had taken a few pictures of the boxes when they arrived... it was absolutely heaven in a box. All these new bricks I had never seen, partially assembled sets, garish colored bricks, and then... a sudden panic attack. These were a lot of random bricks. How was I going to organize them? My personal stash were still stored away in a giant footlocker and were all organized by color. How was I going to integrate these tens of thousands of new bricks?

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of posts, blogs, and tutorials online about the "expert" or "master"  way of doing this. However, most were unrealistic to me. They had lofty expectations of time, space,  and resources. I have plenty of time, but I am a father, husband, etc so I need to be very cognizant of where I spend it.

In the next few posts I hope to share my pitfalls, snags, educations, trials and tribulations around a large influx of new bricks for the Lego layman. Stay tuned as I try and lay out a decent path to organize the chaos of organizing the little bricks from heaven.