When you’re house hunting, one of the biggest factors is storage space. As they say, there’s no such thing as too much storage space. Unfortunately, the current housing market does not really offer houses that have abundant storage space that is within a reasonable price range.
If you want to live in a house where you won’t have to deal with space shortage, then you would have to shell out an exorbitant amount in rental fees. UK residents report spending more than 70% of their monthly salary just on rent alone. Many are left with no choice but to look for side hustles or downsize to afford to have a roof over their heads.
Downsizing is the decision to move from your current place to a smaller area with a smaller rental fee. This usually results in a space deficit that can affect your quality of life. Living in a cluttered area will get to you. You may think that you can live with it, but the problems will slowly stack up.
Read: How to Get the Most out of Your Small Kitchen Space
Health experts state that living in mess and clutter can lead to depression and anxiety, and overall lower quality of life. If you’re downsizing, here are some genius storage ideas and easy projects that you can use for your house.
Install Wall Closets
Wall closets will only take up a few feet off your room but will provide you with more storage area. A wall closet allows you to free up more of your floor space. Your messy mound of shoes, clothes in boxes, and piled up sheets now have a place to go to. Building a DIY wall closet is easy and fast! With the right tools, you can finish this in one weekend. And I recommend, you finish it in one go. Having a half-finished woodworking project inside your flat will just further clutter your house.
Consider A Murphy Bed
Murphy beds may seem a bit childish, but they offer a lot of great benefits. Wall beds create a multi-purpose space inside your flat. Your bedroom can easily turn into a dining room or an office, depending on what you need. With a Murphy bed, you can transform your studio apartment into a complete house with a bedroom, a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, and even a workstation.
Use Your Furniture for Storage
Your bed, couch, and even your dinner table can be turned into storage. Look under your bed or behind your couch and all you’ll see is air. All of it is potential space that you can easily optimize. While your furniture may not be your first option as a storage space, they’re an excellent way to save up on floor area. You can store your clothes, shoes, magazines, and other knick-knacks to make sure they don’t wind up on the floor. You can even take it to the next level (quite literally) by creating a platform storage bed.
Add Shower Rings To Your Hanger
I’m sure that you would agree that the closet is one of the messiest places in the house. The heavy events of the day to day can force us to be erratic with choosing our attire. We take out stuff, try them on, and then just stuff them back in. This behavior requires a much bigger closet space.
Adding shower rings to your hanger is a small step but it will help you organize your closet better. It allows you to showcase all your clothes without needing a lot of hanger space. You can hang your entire closet selection and have your pick without unfolding everything.
Declutter Your House
Before you start looking at storage hacks, you might not even need that much storage space. Make it a habit to declutter your house even if you don’t have to move. You can allot a weekend every six months where you take account of all your items and determine which ones are expendable.
Clutter builds over time. You’d be surprised just how much space you free up once you throw away or donate your clutter. Personally, I cleared out an entire room. What used to be a storage closet is now a guest room that my nieces and nephews use whenever they sleepover.
Rent a Self Storage Unit
Unfortunately, you can try out all of the storage hacks on the Internet but at the end of the day, there’s really just so much space to go through. The best alternative is to rent a self-storage unit. A storage unit in Brighton provides you a remote, secure location where you can safely store all of your items outside your house. This is a great loophole so you don’t have to throw away your clutter. Talk to a nearby on-site manager to properly estimate the unit size that you need.