Add Some Extra Storage To Your Home This Weekend

Not all homes are blessed with endless storage space, so you often need to sell your unwanted crap or find a way to store it. This weekend we’re assuming you’re a pack rat rather than a minimalist and have a number of DIY projects to help you stash more stuff.

The Kitchen

Most kitchens come with a few shelves and drawers. If you’re lucky, you get a pantry as well. Even with all this storage you may not have enough room for all your pots, pans, utensils and foodbecause you’re not storing everything in the most efficient manner. Saucepans, for example, often take up far more space than they need and the lids aren’t much help either. You can create a lot more room in your kitchen with a few adjustments. Here are some examples:

• Add a knife block to a cabinet wall
• Building a pantry shelving system for cans and bottles with pipes
• Create a roll-out pantry that fits between the fridge and the wall
• Hang tea towels on pegs
• Use adhesive hooks to hang saucepan lids on cabinet walls
• Store your knife in a cutting board
• Store kitchen utensils diagonally to maximise space
• Store items under your shelves, too

In most cases, kitchen storage hacks involve a better utilisation of the space that you already have rather than creating more. Kitchens offer so much storage because cookware tends to have awkward, inefficient shapes. With some creative solutions, however, you can fit a lot more with little alteration.

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The Bedroom

A bedroom doesn’t need much more than a bed and your clothing, but we like to make our rooms into more than a place to sleep. Collections, decorations, workspaces, entertainment centres and more find their way into the bedroom to provide us with a room that’s good for more than just sleeping. This often creates a storage problem. Fortunately, you can solve it by utilising wasted and unused space:

• Add a pegboard headboard to your bed for extra storage
• Use your bedroom wardrobe as an office space
• Save space by rolling your towels

You’ll find extra storage in your bedroom under your bed more than anywhere else, but don’t neglect your walls. You can always put extra clutter on the wall. Sometimes it even looks good.

The Living Room(s)

Your living room can serve many purposes. Perhaps it’s where you house your home theatre setup, or maybe you it’s simply a place to sit and talk. Whatever the case, you can add quite a lot of storage with a few simple hacks:

• Float your shelves on the wall for a little extra space
• Combine your coffee table and dining table into one
• Create a folding table that hangs on the wall and looks just like a picture frame
• Build your home theatre into a console table
• Hide your media centre gear behind your wall-mounted television set
• Put a computer in your coffee table
• Give your coffee table storage and a lift-up top
• Put an arcade cabinet into your coffee table
• Make a storage stool out of magazine holders
• Hang little items on the wall with planters

Ultimately, the goal with any room is to find traditionally unused space and find ways to shove your stuff in it. The more you can hide, the more you can keep without cluttering up your home. There’s a point when you just have to say it’s time to get rid of all this crap, but so long as you can find creative places to store it you won’t have to resort to a garage sale just yet.

Have a good weekend!