The Christmas period is over, and life is slowly returning to whatever passes for normal these days! Yet if you’ve acquired an awful lot of ‘stuff’ recently - presents, winter clothing, bargains in the sales - your house might feel cluttered and nothing is where it should be. 

If you’re struggling to find room for everything, or seem to spend all your time looking for things hidden in all the chaos, here are our top 10 storage and organisation essentials for your home.
 

Storage essentials

You’ll have a place for everything, and everything will be in its place with these storage essentials for your kitchen, bathroom and elsewhere:


1. To increase the shelf space in your kitchen, add a shelf riser and double the amount you can fit into your cupboards without losing track of what’s in there. Use it to stack your crockery, organise your baking ingredients, or to stack your canned food. Do yourself a favour, though, and store your tins facing forwards so you can see at a glance what you have! 

You can use shelf risers in other rooms, too - you can buy monitor risers to raise your computer monitor to eye level, and store your keyboard and mouse underneath to keep your desk tidy when they’re not in use.


2. Pans never seem to stack properly, and take up far too much room in your cupboards. Invest in a pan and lid rack and store them vertically. 


3. If you want practical, inexpensive storage for your household essentials, think laterally about how you could use other types of storage. For example, cabinets designed to store shoes can be used for storing all types of household essentials, from laundry supplies to bread and biscuits. They’re narrow, so they don’t take up much space, and you can stack them, too! You could even put one in the bathroom and use it to store your bottles, lotions and potions.


4. Screw cup hooks underneath your shelves and use them to hang utensils such as whisks, ladles, spatulas etc., rather than having to scrabble around in a drawer that won’t open because of all the whisks, ladles and spatulas in it! 


5. No room to air dry your clothes during winter? Fit an overhead clothes airer (also known as a Sheila Maid or pulley airer) and your clothes will be out of the way and will dry really quickly (because heat rises). Your grandma probably had one - she knew what she was doing!


6. If your bathroom is always cluttered with half-empty bottles of shampoo etc, store them neatly in a caddy designed to be hung over your shower screen or door. Avoid having to buy a new one in three months’ time by choosing a rustproof one!


7. For decorative storage, invest in some jars or boxes that coordinate with your colour scheme and use them to store dry foods (e.g. cereals, pasta, rice, tea/coffee). Decant your shampoo, conditioner and shower gel into decorative dispensers to give your bathroom a co-ordinated, tidy appearance.


8. Fed up of sorting through a disorganised kitchen cupboard to find the paprika/salt/balsamic vinegar? Buy some baskets to group similar items together in your cupboard, so you can pull out the basket rather than have to sort through loose items on the shelf. You could have a basket for spices, another for condiments, another for oils and one for tea towels, for instance.
 

Organising essentials

Getting your household organised isn’t always about buying decorative storage or tidying your cupboards. Sometimes, you just need to inject a bit of organisation into your daily life to make life easier.


9. Isn’t it annoying when someone in your house has used the last of the ketchup/salt/milk/jam and not thought to mention it to anyone who actually does the shopping? 

Install a chalkboard or whiteboard on a wall that everyone can reach. Then, make it a rule that if someone uses the last of something, or notices that something is nearly finished, they have to write it on the board so that it can be added to the week’s shopping list.


10. Do your children frequently forget their PE kit, school books or other essentials because they’ve got their days mixed up? Invest in a five-drawer plastic storage unit for each child, and label each drawer with the days of the school week. Make sure the drawers are big enough to fit a standard A4 notebook. 

Support them to get into a routine of putting their homework in the drawer of the day they’ll need to hand it in, or adding part of their PE kit (such as a sock) to remind them to take their kit on the correct days.  

If there’s a special day coming up, like a non-uniform day, help them to remember to wear the right thing by putting a note in the correct draw that week.

Remember that if you have items that you don’t use often (such as those Christmas decorations you’ve just taken down, or sports/camping equipment that you won’t use til summer), you could always rent a small storage unit away from home to keep them safe and out of the way until you need them.  

Hopefully, you’ll find at least some of these ideas useful for your home and can make 2022 the Year You Found Everything, or maybe The Year You Got Organised!