Organize Storage Rooms Tips!
A dedicated storage room for seasonal items, tools, crafting supplies and other items that you don’t want cluttering the rest of your home can come in handy. Unfortunately, it’s also easy for the room to become a mess if you’re always dumping items inside without finding a proper place for them. Organization is key to keeping your storage room neat and easy to navigate — and it’s not as difficult to do as you think. With a few simple changes, you can have a tidy, organized storage room where you can always find what you need.
Take an Inventory
The first step in organizing your storage room is taking inventory of its contents. You can’t come up with an organizational plan if you don’t know what items you need to store. Go through the room’s contents and make a list to keep track of the items. Sorting through your belongings also allows you to identify items that you don’t need so that you can throw them away or arrange to donate them. If there are items in the room that require cleaning, such as clothing or linens, take care of that as well.
Group Like Items
Once you know exactly what you need to store in your room, organizing the contents becomes much easier. Start by grouping like items together. Obviously, you’ll want to keep all of your family’s winter jackets or rain boots together, but you should also organize according to theme. You can group all of your holiday decorations together, whether they’re ornaments or string lights. You should break these general categories into more specific groupings, though. For example, once you have all your crafting supplies gathered together, separate them by the craft so you have individual groups of scrap-booking, crocheting and jewelry-making supplies.
Customize Storage
Not all storage is created equal. The best option depends on the type of items that you plan to store and how often you use them. If you’re storing tools that you reach for regularly, a pegboard wall is an ideal solution because you can hang the items in plain sight where they’re easy to grab. For seasonal items like holiday decorations or winter clothing, closed storage containers like plastic bins or garment bags work well. Specially made containers for hard-to-store items like rolls of wrapping paper and ribbons are also available at home goods stores. Make use of your room’s vertical space for storage as well — add wall-mounted shelves above other furniture items in the room and place plastic bins or baskets on them to separate items by category.
Create Labels
The key to an organized storage room is knowing where every item is. No matter how good your memory may be, it’s easy to lose track of where certain items are. Creating labels for all of the storage options in your room makes it easy to locate items fast – and know where to put new items as you acquire them. Invest in a label maker and create easy-to-read labels to stick on the front of drawers, shelves, plastic bins and baskets. Be as specific as possible when creating the labels. Instead of writing “Holiday Decorations,” create labels that say “Christmas Decorations – ornaments and lights” and “Christmas Decorations – garland and candles.” That way, you can always find exactly what you’re looking for without rooting through multiple drawers or boxes.
sfgate: How to Organize Storage Rooms. 25. September 2018. https://homeguides.sfgate.com/organize-storage-rooms-54201.html
