How to Be Organized, Straight from Our CEO's Mouth
Whether you live in an apartment or a large family home, it always seems like there’s not enough storage in the areas where you need it most. Kitchens, garages and bedroom closets are the big ones.
Do we have solutions for you!
Use your walls for storage
Reconfigure the space (turn it upside down and inside out and all around and you can make things fit)
Invest in storage solution systems
1. Use your walls for storage.
This is the easiest fix for accessibility.
Low storage won’t work for the wee ones, especially in the kitchen. Hang attractive hooks on your walls and hang your pots and pans on them. It’s all about hooks. Hooks are your friend.
In the garage, hook everything - from fishing poles to gardening equipment and from tools to holiday wreaths.
In closets, if you need easy access to things, use hooks for your handbags, belts, dog walking jackets etc.
If you have kids, you know that sometimes kids just won’t hang up their clothes. No problem! They can hook ‘em. (As a Texas Longhorn, I am fond of hooking ‘em.)
2. Reconfigure your space.
When reconfiguring a space, it is necessary to take everything out - everything. For instance, in the kitchen, empty out of all of the cupboards. This can be daunting, so you may want take it one quadrant at a time.
Your glasses and dishes cabinets are not big enough for all you have? The secret weapon here is downsizing, editing or purging. If you can’t fit your things in the space, you have to get rid of some of the things. Reassess where you have your glasses and most usable items. If you need them at your fingertips, why not put your dishes in a drawer? It will save reaching up all the time. Maybe use upper cabinets for sweets and treats outside of the pantry, to keep from the littles.
In the garage, do you have the things you don’t use in the ”best real estate”? (This means the most easily accessible spaces). If so, put everything that you don’t use often up high and everything you use the most in this real estate.
Ahh, closets. In older homes, there is often a long hanging rod that crosses the entire closet, with only one shelf above and sometimes up to 5 feet to the ceiling of worthless space that is not being used. Plus, underneath that rod is where all your shoes just get piled up. A quick fix is shoe shelves. You can get these at Target, and they stack. You can put them on the top shelf as well as underneath. These shoe shelves will save your life and are so inexpensive - it’s a great fix.
3. There are many storage solution systems out there.
They can be as inexpensive as Ikea, where you can find wire-based closet systems (which are actually better for a laundry room) and storage systems. (You probably won’t spend more than $1,000 on this system.)
However, when we at OFab professionally design a storage system for garages or closets, we always use Elfa.
Elfa is an investment. But it creates minimal damage to drywall that can easily be filled when moving, and all Elfa parts fit together to create new spaces in any part of your home.
With Elfa, you can create an office area out of a reach-in closet, a bookshelf or an empty nook. It only takes one blank wall to create an entire desk system for two people, with storage below. What it can do for closets and garages, I can’t even begin to tell you, I just have to show you.
You can spend as little as $500 and go all the way up. I designed an entire five thousand square foot home using customized Elfa solutions.
Some people may not like an open concept, and that’s where California Closet may be useful. (That is big money, but it looks beautiful.)
OFab can use all of these solutions.