How do you guys organize storage in your house?

[Brian Elfert]

I have a serious problem with lack of storage and lack of organization in my house. I'm kinda at my wit's end dealing with it. I live by myself and stuff just piles up everywhere. My garage door opens right into the kitchen and everything gets dropped on the kitchen counter until pretty soon the counter is unusable. My house has zero storage on the 1st floor outside of the kitchen and a 5'x5' walk-in closet off the kitchen. The 1st floor is open concept so the entire 1st floor is open except the half bath and closet.

How have others dealt with this? I'm sure most of you have wives who either just put the stuff away or nag you to put it away. My big problem is where is away? The closet off the kitchen just has 2 shelves in it about 5 feet off the ground on two sides.

The 1st floor of my house is a complete disaster right now. The kitchen counters are full of junk and there are piles of papers and junk on the floor and in boxes. (No, I'm not even close to qualifying for a hoarders type show. There is no trash or anything like that.)

[Ole Anderson]

My favorite storage place is the Salvation Army resale shop and those big green recycle paper bins at the local church..

[Myk Rian]

The 1st floor of my house is a complete disaster right now. The kitchen counters are full of junk and there are piles of papers and junk on the floor and in boxes. (No, I'm not even close to qualifying for a hoarders type show. There is no trash or anything like that.)

Junk and trash are the same thing. That's how you should look at it.
Get a dumpster and start removing the junk/trash.

[Matt Meiser]

There are actually organization consultants out there. My wife won a couple hours from one and a co-worker used money from a work thing we do at the holidays to hire one for his house. Both the co-worker's "before" pics and my wifes room in our basement looked like what you described. Both offered great suggestions. I'm not sure how its working out long term for the co-worker but my wife at least has a plan now when it gets bad.

One suggestion the one my wife had in offered is that most paper you get (I'm not talking pay stubs, bank records, etc.) are just simply not needed for very long after you deal with them. Cell phone bills, utility bills, etc--all of its available online, you've got your bank records of what you paid. We've slowly converted to electronic on some of that and I think more will go that way soon in our house. The biggest problem is where it goes--some goes to my wife, some to me. I've been thinking of setting up a "bills" email and setting that up to forward to both my wife and I.

Another thing I've started doing--I get the mail virtually every day since I'm home when it comes. I immediately open, sort, and recycle all the junk (credit cardd offers, weekly Sirius begging, catalogs we don't care about, envelopes, return envelopes for the bills since we don't use them, ads inserted in the bills, etc.) If I do it in my office it goes immediately to the recycling bin. Sometimes if its in the kitchen it can build up for a couple days. My wife has gotten pretty good at reviewing what's left of my first pass and pruning further. The bills go in Quicken within a few days and head for the basement.

[Brian Elfert]

Junk and trash are the same thing. That's how you should look at it.
Get a dumpster and start removing the junk/trash.

It isn't nearly to the point that I need a dumpster. There isn't that much junk. (What I meant by no trash is no rotting food or anything like that.) The open concept of my house makes the problem seem really bad. I don't have a side room that could hold this stuff out of sight.

I've converted almost 100% of my bills and statements to electronic delivery. I try recycle all the junk mail every day. I belong to several committees and boards of smaller non-profits. Every monthly meeting I end up with a pile of paper. I feel like I need to hold onto the papers for a while though I can't remember ever looking at them after the meeting. Like Matt says there are papers that one gets that need to be held temporarily, but then one has to go back and purge and it is sometimes hard to decide how long to keep something.

I recently spent over a month organizing my garage and managed to get everything organized and on shelves. The garage was so bad I had to rent a storage container for 4 weeks so I could get everything out of the garage. The garage needs some fine tuning, but it is just too cold out there right now. I have my car in the garage for the first time in at least 5 years. I threw away, sold, and gave away a lot of stuff. I tried to attach garage photos before/after, but they are too big.

[Brian Elfert]

Okay, I decide to swallow my pride and post several photos of my mess. One is looking at the kitchen/eating area and two are the great room/living room. The treadmill is going to get moved as soon as I finish running the 20 amp circuit for it. I have to get back to cleaning now.

[Stephen Cherry]

Brian- first of all, don't get yourself in a rut thinking about this, it's really not that bad. Like you said, it's just stuff-- not rotting food or anything like that.

Storage bins, more cabinets, shelves, etc. And maybe some of it needs to go away.

I would recommend spending just 30 minutes at a time on it until it's under control. Put on your favorite cd, or rerun of a show that you like, and have at it. If you try to think of it all at the same time, it will seem insurmountable.

Also, remember, this is the time of the year that everybody feels in a rut- it's got to do with the lack of light and cold weather. I know that I do, and at my work they even send out emails telling people that it's that time of year. Maybe get on that treadmill and do 20-30 minutes- another show or cd.

[paul cottingham]

I don't know, it looks a lot like my house. Fretting about mess (not filth) is highly overrated. I know people who make themselves absolutely miserable about this sort of stuff, to the point where they literally clean their house 5 days a week. And they make everyone around them miserable if they don't live with the same sort of hyper-vigilance about clutter.
give yourself a break. If it really makes you unhappy, clean a small area every day. That will at least give you the feeling that you are doing something about it.
but don't let it mess with your serenity.

[glenn bradley]

I too live alone and sometimes tend to use my house as one big bedroom, leaving things where they obviously don't belong or have any use. Having somewhere for "everything" to go is required in order for "everything" to be organized. You could build shelf units or racks to hold plastic bins in lieu of built-in storage which I see you have little of (me too). I added wire shelves to closets scaled around duplicate sized lidded bins for seasonal storage. If there is not somewhere for something to go, I give it thorough consideration as to whether I want it bad enough to make the kitchen table its permanent location in my life. Usually the "thing" will lose and a usable kitchen table will win. That being said, I regularly cycle through clean phases and phases where the only reason I know that I have a kitchen table is that all that "stuff" can't be levitating.

[Brian Elfert]

This has been an ongoing issue for a long time. It really has nothing to do with the particular time of year. The mess in my house causes me not to get things done because I feel guilty about the mess and end up watching TV or sitting at the computer instead. I've made a small dent so far this weekend.

Yes, I can clean this up and make it look nice for a few days or weeks, but I really need to figure out places to store things so it doesn't keep happening. My house has so little storage compared to a lot of other houses. My parents have some huge cabinets in their living room that hold a ton of stuff. Of course, more storage can just mean storing more stuff. My parents have hundreds and hundreds of old magazines they may never reference again in their cabinets.

[Ole Anderson]

Hey man, you are working on it and asking for help. That is a great start. Maybe there is a 12 step program. Hi, I'm Brian and I've got a mess.

[Bonnie Campbell]

I've got a manufactured home and it has no storage. Lots of open space, but limited 'hidey holes'. A closed cabinet set up with at least one file cabinet by your computer might be good. Book cases in front of the windows could help too. One thing I used to do was have a small table designated for piling things on that just came into the house. That table could look bad, but it kept my kitchen and dining room table cleared for use. When/if things start teetering on the table I'd clear it off lol

[Erik Loza]

Good suggestions in here. My wife and I recently did a major remodel to our house, which required us to scale down from (what was) a 1,500 house to an 800' apartment for 6 months and we both work from home. So, we REALLY had to be organized.

First thing we did was donate a lot of stuff to Goodwill/Salvation Army. A LOT of stuff. We were not hoarders by any stretch but had accumulated lots of things over the years that when I was going through them, was like, "Where did this come from? Why do we still have it?". We probably thinned our material possessions by at least 50% and to be honest, I am glad to be rid of that stuff. Now that we are back in the house, we find that we greatly enjoy a less cluttered environment.

Second thing was that I moved everything that was to be stored into transparent plastic tubs or totes. Bright green painter's tape label on the front of each one: "Xmas wrapping stuff", "winter socks". etc. I do this both in the garage and in the house (in the closets and pantry) and it has greatly optimized out space. Since the tubs are clear, I no longer find things hiding or accumulating in there that I would've done something about otherwise.

Honestly, though, the biggest thing that helped us was the actual committment to "owning less stuff". Unless you shift to that mentality, you organize now and then recreate the problem in 6 months. At least that is what we found. Hope this helps,

Erik Loza
Minimax USA

[Brian Elfert]

Second thing was that I moved everything that was to be stored into transparent plastic tubs or totes. Bright green painter's tape label on the front of each one: "Xmas wrapping stuff", "winter socks". etc. I do this both in the garage and in the house (in the closets and pantry) and it has greatly optimized out space. Since the tubs are clear, I no longer find things hiding or accumulating in there that I would've done something about otherwise.

Honestly, though, the biggest thing that helped us was the actual committment to "owning less stuff". Unless you shift to that mentality, you organize now and then recreate the problem in 6 months. At least that is what we found. Hope this helps,

I use the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers in my garage and some in my basement storage. I like the clear containers, but how do you keep from breaking them? The clear containers seem to break if you look at them wrong while the roughneck containers survive about anything.

I'm not sure stuff is as much an issue for me as is the sheer amount of paper in piles. I've been working on a project for six years now where I keep buying parts for the project all the time and generating lots of paper. I need to file it in my file cabinet. That said, I do need to re-evaluate how much stuff I do keep. There is stuff I come across that I forgot I had and I hold on it thinking I will use it some day, but then I forget all about it again. I got rid of a ton of stuff when I cleaned out my garage in November.

I am going to move my filing cabinet next to my computer to replace the printer stand. That way I'll actually use the filing cabinet.

[Brian Elfert]

Here are before and after pictures from when I organized my garage in November and early December. (It took at least 5 weeks total.) Maybe I will post after pictures of my house when I ever get it finished. The garage was in much worse shape than the before photo suggests. There was only one walking path in the whole garage to the door into the house. I literally had no place left to set anything in the garage.