Storage is one thing that we all seem to need more of and as you know, with storage, it’s very easy to completely forget what items you’ve stored and where. I want you to leave behind your old methods of storing items and follow the tried and true system of effective storage.

Organising your storage at home

What you’ll need to begin with is a simple organisational plan for your storage. It’s always a good idea to write down the plan, as to help in remembering where each item is stored. You should also inform the rest of the household where the plan is kept.

You’ll be referring to the organisational plan you wrote earlier, but the important thing is the understand that basements, garages and spare bedrooms should not be used as dumping sites for all your unused household items. You can keep some of your more sentimental or often used items there but you should ideally try to giveaway, sell or get rid of the other items. Also try to resist the “in case” syndrome. What is that? Well it’s when you have this sudden, powerful urge to hoard items in case you need it in the future.

With that said, I’ll delve a bit into how I go about making a storage plan and hopefully it provides you with some ideas to help improve your current organisational plan. This is my iteration of a plan I got from a friend of a friend so feel free to adapt it to your home but the plan works for all spaces, from stuffy attics to overcrowded rental storage units.

So, to begin, you’ll need a few things: paper, a marker, strong plastic or cardboard bins/boxes. After acquiring those items, here’s what you want to do:

Separate Your Things Into Categories

You want to start by separating your things into bigger, broader categories such as kitchen items, work related, kids’ clothes etc.

You then want to place items into bins, with each category having it’s own bin(s). So you could have four work related bins, three kitchen items bins, two holiday bins and three kids’ clothes bins.

After that, label each bin by category; for example Kitchen Stuff, Kids’ Clothes, Work Related etc on the 4 sides and the lid of the bin. No need to mark the bottom of the bin. Once that’s done you give a number to each bin in each category. Ex. Holiday 1, Holiday 2, Kids’ Clothes 1, Kid’s Clothes 2

Separate The Space In Your Storage Into Categories

To effectively organise your storage you should figuratively divide the space in into the same number of parts as you have categories. So if you have four categories you’d have four parts.

What you then do is to give each space it’s own category. So if you were organising the basement for instance and you had divided it into 4 spaces, you’d assign the lower left quadrant as the work related space. Draw the storage area on your paper, divide them into the various spaces then label them.

On a different page, list each bin (ex. Work Related 1, Kids’ Clothes 2 etc) and its content (ex. Socks, Financial statements etc). Of course, the more bins you add to a category, the more numbers you add as well (ex. Kids’ Clothes 4, Kids’ Clothes 5)

Note the number of storage bins you have in each category as you organise, just to help you to easily locate items and know if you have them all.

That’s all there is to it! Next time you want to find that special item, all you need to do is consult your list and your map to keep your home neat!