The average person cannot always afford the services of a professional organiser to help them create more space within their home. With that in mind, we thought we would offer some do it yourself ideas to help you make your home more spacious.
Three Bins
Create three bins: donate, recycle, and discard. It’s often easier to start with smaller rooms within your home when looking at ways to create more space. The rule of thumb is to take items that you haven’t used within the last twelve months and get rid of them. This is where your bins come in – is the item something you can donate to goodwill, recycle (or upcycle) into something more useful for your home, or is it something to be discarded completely?
Pegboards
During your initial tidy-up, you may come across items such as old photographs that are not in albums, nor in frames. If you’d like to display these memories, a great way to do so if you don’t have much space on the mantlepiece is to put them up on a pegboard. These boards are also an excellent way to organise family activities.
Additional Storage
Many potential home buyers or renting tenants will often place storage on the “wish list”. This could be anything from built-in cupboards, numerous shelves, or a large storage space outdoors, such as conventional garden sheds or more modern log cabins which can have multi-functional uses.
Having built-in cupboards in a home not only creates additional space and allows for a less cluttered look within the bedroom, but it also adds value to your property should you one day consider putting it in the market.
The demand for additional storage has spilled over into furniture manufacturing. These days you may be able to purchase a bed that has a hidden compartment within the base or even a coffee table that has a flap that lifts for you to store items within.
Clear and Labelled
Another tip we can offer is to place items in clear, transparent storage boxes. This can be anything from children’s toys, to shoes, to your power tools. The great thing about this kind of storage solution is that you can see what is inside the box and it’s even easier to find what you’re looking for if the box has been labelled. Labelling works well when you’re freezing leftovers too. Another excellent way to store bulky items such as duvets, is to place them in transparent vacuum-sealable bags. This not only reduces the bulk of the item but also keeps it safe from pests such as moths.
Off-Site Storage Units
If you have a great deal of items that need to be stored and still don’t have sufficient space within your home, you might want to consider to-rent-storage-spaces. These will allow you to sort through the clutter without creating additional chaos within your home. The advantage of renting one of these spaces is that it can be done on a short-term or long-term basis. The key though, is to remember that you should part with the items you no longer want or need.
We hope that these few guidelines give you a point to start and that by decluttering and creating additional space within your home, it will be the haven of which you’ve always dreamed.
