Use the right kind of storage

Once you have identified the spaces where you can hide your stuff from being visible all the time, another question remains: what should you do with all the small, niggly things that have come to light when you shifted the large stuff into those dark corners?

You may have come across all manner of items that you couldn’t quite make sense of, from that random collection of rubber bands, thumb tacks and hairpins to miscellaneous blank greeting cards, from foreign coinage to printed photographs, notebooks full of what appears to be useful and/or important information. Now what? Of course, you could dedicate a drawer to just those items, but then you would really just open Pandora’s box for another go.

There are lots of things that conform to a standard shape, size or weight, like books (usually a particular height to width ratio, easily stackable), cooking pots (can often be stored one inside the other), paperwork (can be piled into a tray), food tins (can usually be stacked due to similar dimensions), etc. There is a reason why a lot of things come with relatively standardised dimensions, as they need to be easy to transport, store and stock in the shops.

You’ll find that – even if not all of these items follow the exact same rules, many are fundamentally very similar. Probably you have even made use of this feature unconsciously in the past! These are easy items, they are recognisable and speak to our practical nature. Whoever has heard of anyone unable to stack tins or place books in a shelf?

However, some items need a more specific kind of storage in order for you to easily store them and to quickly retrieve them when necessary, like those rubber bands or foreign coins. Others are special because they are different in content or meaning from other items that are very similar at first sight, like the notebooks or certain photographs. Let’s focus on those for now, without taking into account intangible items like electronic files or images on your mobile phone.

The first order of the day is easy: unusual items need unusual storage options. As we have seen, books come all ready with options to keep them organised and we all learn early on how they work. Rubber bands, though, need a different approach. Left to their own devices they will always untangle and mix up with other things that become difficult to use as they are all tangled up. My trick here is simple: roll the bands into a ball of bands and keep adding. Not only will they all keep together, but you’ll have an easy to find spot to add others to.

Rubber bands are just an example to show you that we need to think outside of the box when it comes to miscellaneous items, and we need to look closely to identify the quality that makes them easier to organise: in this case, stretch factor and their easy-squeeze quality.

Here are some more pointers to get you going:

• thumbtacks could be organised in a matchbox or an old medication package (properly labelled, of course);
• hairpins could be collected on a piece of cloth hanging from your dressing mirror;
• foreign coins might find a home in a separate wallet, ready to be taken away on a trip in the future;
• printed photographs often end up in boxes – but if they mean something to you, why not display them in some way? Either as a regularly changing set of frames, or digitised and running as your desktop background?
  
• Diverse notebooks accumulate with a certain regularity, and most of what they contain is useless. We only keep them because of the bits of information that we can still identify. Why not go through these notebooks and take note of the pearls of wisdom, then chuck the original book away?
  

Those are just a couple of basic examples, but you can probably see what they all have in common: it takes a bit of effort to identify them and find a way to deal with them. Not the kind of thing you want to do on a big decluttering day, then. My advice is to group all these kinds of items together during a declutter and take care of them separately. It is important, though, to take all of them out of their hiding places, or they will simply stay there forever.

When the time comes, sit down and review the miscellaneous small items and think what you can do with them and how you can properly store them. The above bullet points could give you a first idea of the possibilities, and some of the avenues to explore. As a general comment, it is helpful to have small boxes and containers on hand as you will likely need at least a certain number of them.

You may have come to the understanding that those miscellaneous items are often smaller than the less tricky ones, but that may not always be the case: think about painting canvases in varying sizes, odd-shaped furniture, or decorative items of a bulky nature. But those are a story for another time…

If you have enjoyed reading this, you may find these other articles interesting:

• Cloud storage
• Desk drawer drama
• Starting small