When you live in a small home (or perhaps just have a lot of stuff), you have to get creative pretty quickly to make sure you’ve got enough room for all of your possessions. Instead of throwing away all of your favourite things, there are a number of different ways to store your items that’ll make your small home feel that much more spacious.
1. Extendable Dining Table
It’s always nice to have somewhere you can socialise with friends and family over a drink, board game or a home cooked meal. Unfortunately, when you don’t have a dining room it’s not necessarily possible to keep a six chair dining table in the corner of your living room. But this doesn’t mean you can’t have a dining table at all. There are many dining tables that have extendable components, or fold away to barely nothing, meaning you can easily store the table away neatly whenever it’s not in use.
2. Double up
If your bedroom isn’t blessed with space, one of the easiest ways to generate more room is to double up your desk or dressing table as a bedside table. This way, you don’t need to clutter your room with more furniture than it can handle, and you won’t waste any space that could be utilised in other ways. This simple hack will make your bedroom appear a lot bigger, and is also cost effective as you won’t need to buy two pieces of furniture.
3. Under-bed storage
We all know that the bed takes up the majority of space in the bedroom, and with today’s more fashionable frames they’re taking up more space than ever. That’s why it’s useful to utilise some of that dead space by fitting draws underneath for additional storage. Whilst some of us are lucky enough to have beds with drawers already fitted underneath, the majority of beds don’t, so it’s a good idea to buy drawers on wheels to slide underneath your bed. This will help you to use the space in a tidy way.
4. Bedside organiser
In a very similar way to the drawers under the bed, you can buy fabric organisers which hook onto the bedframe, allowing you to store smaller items so that they’re easy to reach. You may need a particular frame, either metal or wood, to allow the organiser to attach to the bedside. However, if you do have a suitable bed frame, then the organiser is a good idea for items that you need to access more regularly, like your phone!
5. Inside your wardrobe door
The space on the inside of your wardrobe door is a particularly underused area for storage. We’ve all been culprits of trying to cram everything we can into the wardrobe until it’s basically bursting at the seams. But have you ever considered utilising the space by storing items in a holder that hangs on the inside of the door? They’re great for shoes, scarves and t-shirts, as well as making much needed room within the wardrobe itself for other pieces of clothing. You can also use a storage holder on the inside of your bedroom door in the same way.
6. Shoe cabinet
Have you ever used up so much space trying to store your shoes, but no matter how hard you try, they still never look neat and tidy? Well, the best way to keep your shoes is in a piece of furniture dedicated to shoes – a shoe cabinet. Not only are they a nice piece of additional furniture, but they can also be cost effective. And they don’t take up much space as they’re usually quite shallow and can be fixed to your wall.
7. Ottoman
If you rent your property and are not allowed to fix things to your walls, then an ottoman is another good idea for storing your shoes (or anything else you wish to store). An ottoman can also double up as a coffee table and or a bench - as with your bedside table, doubling up your furniture is a great way to save space.
8. Shelving
Using the walls of your small home is another way to save on space - not everything needs to be positioned on the floor. And the beauty of shelving is that you can store pretty much anything you want on there, whether it be books, photographs, or even a display of collectible figurines - a sure conversation starter for when people come over. Shelving can be used in pretty much every room of the house, from your bathroom to your garage, and is a cheap and effective way of keeping all of your belongings out of the way, but accessible.
9. Plinth drawers
The ‘plinth’ in your kitchen is basically what hides the gap between your cupboards and the kitchen floor. This is space you could really make use of, especially if your kitchen cupboards are sparse. Why not change the plinth from being a single block of wood to a shallow drawer? This could be an ideal space to store kitchen tea towels, oven gloves, or anything else you need to keep handy.
10. Vacuumed storage bags
Vacuumed storage bags are a fantastic way to store clothes with minimal hassle. We usually put our winter jumpers or summer shorts away depending on the season. But in doing so, we normally take up extra drawer or cupboard space that is usually hard to come by. By using vacuumed storage bags, where all the air is suctioned out, you can fit all of your items inside with no space is wasted. You can store them almost anywhere, but the loft would be an ideal space to use as the vacuum bags will also protect your clothes from dust and debris.