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A tiny home can feel spacious and airy when it’s well-organized. Meanwhile, a huge house can feel cluttered and claustrophobic if things aren’t stored properly. Even celebrities with huge houses can hoard, and make their mansions feel minuscule once inside. Like with anything in life—your money, your looks, and your home—it’s about what you do with what you’ve got. If you don’t learn that skill, you can go from rich to poor quickly, post-liposuction fit to flabby in a week, and tidy to messy overnight. We have to cherish, respect, and care for what we have. And doing that with our home is a great start, because when your home looks good, you feel good. You can feel motivated and energized. The appearance of our surroundings affects us greatly like that.
Now, a lot of people have perfectly lovely homes that look cluttered simply because they don’t know how to store and organize things. There’s a reason that there’s an entire industry around professional decorators and, you guessed it, organizers! It’s an art form. It’s a skill. And it’s something in which a lot of us are a bit clueless. You have the best intentions when you pick up those cute storage baskets and shelves from the home goods store. And then, somehow, you look at your home and think, “Hm. This isn’t what I envisioned. This looks cramped. This looks cluttered.”
We have our instincts. Maybe it’s what our parents did. Maybe it’s what’s quick and easiest. But what’s quick and easiest isn’t always worth it if the result is an eyesore. If it’s hard to navigate your home and find things, then you actually lose time on the back end. Here are storage mistakes you’re probably making.
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Clear storage
Clear, plastic storage bins help you see everything at a glance, but they also let everyone else see everything, and that makes a space look cluttered. Stick to opaque storage bins and simply add a small ID sticker on each one to let you know what’s inside of them. You don’t need to see your kid’s toys and your staplers and paper clips peering through clear bins.
