We bagged the bits and switches, then put them in the bin with the old harness.

Step 7

We kept doing that with the groups from our box—we either started a bin for the group, or found a bin to hold the smaller pieces. When our table was mostly empty, we brought out the next disorganized cardboard box and repeated the process.

Step 8

After a while, we had several bins to fill as we emptied and grouped the disorganized boxes and parts.

Step 9

Eventually, we had nearly everything in a bin on our shelves. We used several sizes of bins and set up our shelves to hold them with little wasted space. We usually buy the bins at big-box stores and have found that they go on sale after any major holiday—sometimes even in holiday colors. The shelves don’t go on sale as often, but they’re pretty fairly priced anyway. We figure we usually save at least that much by not misplacing and replacing parts. Plus, we save a lot of time by not having to constantly search for parts. While the full bins stacked on the shelves looked great, we weren’t quite done yet.

Step 10

In the case of this Mini, we spent about 3 hours sorting parts and putting them into bins. We had about one more hour to go, and it would be the most important hour. After filling the bins, we dumped their contents one by one. We carefully laid out the contents so we could see them clearly, took a photo, then put the parts back in their bin. For each of our 18 boxes, we assigned it a number, came up with a description of its contents, and stuck it with a self-stick mailing label that had this information on it.