If you’ve ever wished your house had just one or two more rooms, a little planning and double-duty furniture could compensate. Before rushing out to buy a bigger house, try a few of these less-expensive options first.
Have a specified “project table” where you can put magazine articles that need to be read, clothing that needs repair or library books to return. When you get a small, free stretch of time complete one project from the stack. Eventually, you will find yourself caught up on all of them.
Bookshelves do not necessarily have to be used exclusively for books. Uniform plastic, labeled storage containers can be neatly arranged on these shelves for convenient accessibility. Use a separate box for each category of items:
Office supplies
Keep things where they are most likely to be used, and keep related items together. By keeping each category of treasures consolidated in one location, you will always know where everything is and will never have to go searching for them again.
Storage space is prime real estate and is quickly becoming an ever-increasing to-die-for commodity. Discover space you never knew you had and organize every inch of it. Seek out undeveloped, over-looked and even unconventional expanses to use as stash space. Every house has much more storage area than what meets the untrained eye.
Instead of using additional floor space, take advantage of every vertical inch of area from floor to ceiling, maximizing every cubic inch by stacking same-size boxes or plastic storage containers one on top of another as high as you can go with them.
Colored storage boxes in the basement, garage and attic can be tremendously beneficial to determine their contents at a glance. If blue boxes in the basement are appointed for excess bed linens, green for excess table linens, and white for Christmas decorations, for example, you will know what is contained within each box without needing to dig through each one individually to find out what’s in it.
Folding and distributing clean laundry can also be expedited by color-coding. If all white towels and washcloths are designated to Bathroom #1 and all blue towels and washcloths are delegated to Bathroom #2, you will never have to worry about a shortage of linens on the first floor or a surplus of linens on the second floor.
Take a look at every closet, cubbyhole, drawer and cabinet seriously. Box, label and organize everything you own. Look for tricky little places to keep items together.
Stackable, wooden shelves come in several shapes and sizes and will fit practically anywhere. The additional amount of storage space they provide makes them indispensable. Closet organizers and shoe bags are virtual storage gold mines.
Upright storage cabinets are available at any department store and are versatile additions to any room of the house. Their adjustable shelves allow accommodations for all sizes and shapes of storage containers and devices. By simply and inexpensively replacing their original wooden handles, they can be made to coordinate with virtually any room’s decor.
When not in use, simply close the doors to conceal the contents.
A portable kitchen work island doesn’t necessarily need to be in a kitchen. Any extra 4-square foot of space can accommodate one in any room of the house. These base cabinet units provide storage space unimaginable for any kind of hobby or craft and the laminated top serves as the ideal work area for every kind of project.
If space permits, the laundry room would be the perfect location for an island – serving as an area to fold clothes as well as providing storage underneath for laundry detergent and fabric softener.
Let your imagination run rampant in discovering creative and innovative storage ideas to adapt to your own personal needs.
For more, please visit www.organization101.net
Terri Emmett has written a complete HAPPINESS TRILOGY collection: THE ORGANIZED HOUSEKEEPER’S HOUSEBOOK; THE ORGANIZED HOUSEKEEPER’S SIX-WEEK CHARM COURSE; and 100 STEPS TO ETERNITY. For links to the complete collection, please visit http://www.touramerica.org and http://www.charmcourse.com
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