5 Must Try Home Organization Tips
A home is an extension of the self. It’s your decision what furniture you fill it with, what type of decorations you hang on the wall, and what pieces of your personality you choose to express through your preferred design aesthetics.
Over time, the accumulation of items combined with the businesses of life can cause these expressions of our personalities to instead become annoyances as they pile up and get in the way of our day-to-day lives. Storage of America has some small home organization tips you can try, and how self-storage can help.
Rotate Your Clothing
Unless you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with a stable climate year-round, chances are you have clothing that you only wear during certain parts of the year. The rest of the time, these items sit in your dresser or closet, taking up space for months at a time without any actual use.
One home organization idea is to rotate your clothing seasonally. When it’s winter, pack away the summer clothes, and vice versa in the summer. One easy way to do this and to keep the rotated clothing from becoming a mess of its own is to invest in vacuum sealed bags. Place your folded clothing into these bags, seal the bags, and then use a vacuum to suck the excess air from the bags.
This will compress your clothing down to a much smaller size, making it easy to store the bagged clothing elsewhere, such as under your bed, in a spare drawer, or in the back of your closet. You could also explore self-storage options, which provide storage units of varying sizes to choose from, meaning you could easily choose a unit that’s just the right size for your off-season clothing.
If you’re packing away dresses, suits, long jackets, or anything prone to wrinkling, we recommend storing them in a wardrobe box. By utilizing this option, you’ll be able to keep your items on hangers and help prevent them from being smashed or wrinkled until you’re ready to retrieve them the following season. This also makes for a seamless transition from your closet to storage and back again. Need to stock up on boxes? Storage of America has you covered! Stop by our office and browse available packing and moving supplies for sale including wardrobe boxes, traditional moving boxes, tape, bubble wrap, and more.
Invest in Storage Totes
Plastic storage totes are perhaps the single greatest home organization tool on the market. They provide a central place to store small items that may otherwise take up a lot of extra space if stored separately, and they stack easily to take up less floor space wherever you choose to place them once they’re full.
Storage totes are also a great way to rotate out items that you may not have year-round use for. Say, for example, you have holiday or seasonal decorations that you only use during certain months of the year. Placing these seasonal items together into a storage tote provides a convenient way to keep them together in one place without having them take up excessive space when not in use.
Of course, some seasonal items may not store well in non-seasonal temperatures. Your winter decorations may be better suited to winter temperatures, and may not hold up well in the hot summer heat. This, of course, is problematic if you store things in your attic. Self-storage is a wonderful solution to this dilemma, as climate-controlled storage is an option, meaning your items will be stored at a steady, regulated temperature year-round.
Label Liberally
Labels are a cheap, simple way to aid in your home organization. Of course, these can easily go hand-in-hand with the previous two suggestions, as labeling your bagged clothing and tote-stored items can allow you to identify what’s in each bag or tote at a glance when you go to retrieve it from your storage space or residential storage unit, but labels can also help organize other areas of your house.
For example, perhaps you have a home pantry and your goal is to keep it organized, but by the time you get home from the grocery store, you find yourself too tired to think about where to place items and instead just aim to get them into the pantry as quickly as possible, resulting in a disorganized mess.
By placing labels at selected spots on your shelves, you can create designated spaces for the items stored there, and when you do come back from the store exhausted and ready to be finished with the task, you won’t have to think about where to put each item. You will already have a labeled section for the items in your bags and will simply need to place each item in its pre-designated space.
Be Willing to be Unconventional
Many people utilize the storage space in their homes the way they grew up seeing those spaces used, even if that usage isn’t the most convenient or efficient method for their home. For example, many kitchens with mounted microwaves have a smaller set of cabinets above the microwave that tend to become home to an unorganized mess of storage containers.
On the other hand, perhaps you are an avid coffee drinker, and that cabinet space would be the perfect place to keep all of your coffee-related supplies in one place. While most people may prefer to keep the coffee with the food, the sugar with the spices, the coffee grinder with the appliances, and so on, keeping these things together would make more sense since you use them together so often.
Or perhaps you try to keep all of your appliances tucked away when not in use, because you’ve always seen kitchen counters clear of anything that isn’t being used. Instead, if you have the counter space, consider arranging your appliances in a way that is aesthetically pleasing but that also allows them to remain out. This not only frees up cabinet space, it also makes your appliances readily available for use whenever you need them.
Utilize Drawer Organizers
Drawers are perhaps the easiest item to find cluttered in a home. One moment an item is placed in a drawer momentarily, the next that drawer has instead become a home to all sorts of disorganized odds and ends and becomes affectionately referred to as the “junk drawer”.
To help stave off the junk drawer curse, utilize draw organizers. What types of organizers you buy will ultimately depend on the size of your drawers and what you hope to store there, but one idea would be to use small plastic containers to sort supplies such as pens, pencils, paper clips, highlighters, and so forth.
There are also drawer organizers for utensils that can be used to keep your kitchen drawers organized. These provide individual spaces for spoons, forks, knives, and other kitchen utensils, making it easy to open the drawer and retrieve what you need at a glance.
Home Organization for A Happier You
Home organization can be a time-consuming process, but it is also a rewarding process. Use these tips for cleaning and organizing your home and discover how much happier you will be when your home is much easier to navigate and much less cluttered. Explore the self-storage options offered by Storage of America by finding a location near you and renting a storage unit today for the extra edge you need in maintaining a clutter-free home.