4 Unexpected Items That Make Organizing Easy

Self storage and organizing go hand in hand. If you own more than will fit comfortably in your home, you get a self storage unit. Often, you’ll switch items in and out, using your unit as an off-season wardrobe, or to keep other things you don’t need at a given time of the year.

Once you’ve stored away the things you don’t need right now, it’s down to arranging things at home. To help you get started, here are four items you can purchase cheaply and use now to start organizing your home, and give it a more unified look at the same time.

Mason Jars

For your kitchen or your desk, there’s nothing quite like quality jars to store a variety of small things. For quality and a great look, we suggest using Ball mason jars, which you can get in a variety of sizes. These jars are made for canning jams, jellies, sauces, and the like, but they make handy, attractive storage containers for other things too.

Use a few on your desk to hold paper clips, pens and pencils, push-pins, and other small office supplies. In the pantry, you can use them to store dry goods like nuts, chocolate chips, and several types of pasta.

Do you have extra space you’d like to use underneath your kitchen cabinets? You can attach the lids of your mason jars to the bottom of cabinets and screw the jars to the lids. This hanging jar storage is both attractive and practical.

In addition, there are numerous ways to decorate mason jars. You can paint them, glue fun figures to the lids, put on your own custom-made stickers, and much more.

Shower Rings

While standard clothes hangers can work well, especially with a bit of modification, some things are better organized with shower curtain rings.

Perhaps you have a bunch of scarves in your self storage unit with your winter wardrobe. A great way to organize them once you get them home is by putting a row of shower curtain rings on a clothes hanger. You can thread each scarf through a ring, and keep a good ten to twenty scarves on one hanger.

Would you like to hang your purses or hats in your closet along with your clothes? Just put those shower curtain rings on the bar going across your closet and hang your carrying bags and such on them.

In the kitchen, install a tension rod in a cabinet or underneath the sink and put a bunch of shower curtain hangers there. Put your kitchen towels through them, or hang tea cups or mugs.

PVC Pipe

Much like mason jars, PVC pipe comes in a variety of sizes. In the case of these pipes, we’re talking about the diameter. PVC pipe ranges from a diameter of ¾ inches to 6 inches or more. This opens up a huge range of possible organization uses.

Creating any sort of PVC pipe organization solution will take some DIY effort. You’ll need to cut the pipe so that you get sections of the desired length. You may want to use framing tape around the edges to improve the look. Also, you may want to glue several sections together so that they work as a unit. With such steps done, you’ll have an arrangement of rings you can store various things in. With a group of pipes about 6 inches in diameter, you can make a modern-looking shoe cubby.

In the kitchen, you could pipes with the openings facing upward to the inside of a cabinet and place your measuring cups and spoons inside by the handles. When made the right size, the spoon sections will stop at the neck of each pipe. You can do something similar in the garage to easily store tools.

Magazine Holders

One nice organizational solution you can adapt right out of the box, so to speak, is the humble magazine holder. With their box shape and diagonal-cut design, they fit into all sorts of spaces, be they bookshelves, cupboards, or on counters, hold their contents well, and are easy to retrieve things from. You’ll find them in a variety of materials, from cardboard, to plastic, to metal.

So, besides magazines, what can you keep in magazine holders? Metal ones in a dark part of your pantry can keep potatoes, onions, and bulbs of garlic in an ideal room-temperature environment and prevent them from rolling around. If you have trouble keeping your aluminum and plastic wraps wrangled, you’re in luck. A magazine holder makes a great place to keep about four of these at once.

Your home office may be relatively paper-free compared to past years, but most of us still have some paperwork that we need stored but easily accessed. Put a couple of magazine holders on a bookshelf, then buy a package of manilla folders for the paperwork, and store it in the holders. You can also use one to keep your unanswered snail mail and unpaid bills.

If you like these ideas, use them, and watch your home come that much more into order. And, if you’re looking for additional ideas, we have many on the StorageFront blog.