An organized home is the first element to creating a comfortable and stylish place to live.
I’m a believer that the first step to being organized and having a clean home is to have nothing on the floor other than the furniture meant to be there.
Clothing, newspapers, toys, gym bags and shoes should all have a place.
Here’s a few ways to get your stuff up off the floor.
Clothing
Adding a second hanging bar in the closet for pants, installing an upper shelf to hold an extra row of folded sweaters and adding hooks to the inside of the closet doors will help your standard closet hold about 30 per cent more clothing and accessories.
Vacuum-sealed bags help reduce clothing’s bulk and keep dust off out-of-season clothing and a canvas-portable closet is an affordable way to create an extra closet to hold the overflow.
They’re also great to set up in an apartment storage locker to store out-of-season clothing.
While organizing your closet, why not spruce it up with a few decorative touches? Painting the inside of it a fashionable colour, adding updated door hardware and investing in attractive wooden hangers are simple ways to making the closet look like a million bucks.
Shoes
Building narrow shelves up the walls inside a closet is the best way to store shoes. If done smart, you can contain 40 to 50 pairs of shoes in a single closet without taking away hanging space.
A tall, vertical shoe rack (easily purchased from display storage suppliers and online) keep your best shoes on view and easily accessible. If you have no room in your closet for shoes, consider decorative shoe boxes lined up at the edge of a staircase or stored in under-the-bed roll out drawers.
Hanging hooks
Decorative hooks are a dime a dozen, so buy at least a dozen and put them around your home. Those items that you need every day (scarves, purses, gym bags, etc.) will stay off the floor and have a stylish place to call home.
Remember to hang at two heights — 42 inches and 66 inches off the floor. This will allow younger children to hang their coats and have them easily accessible. Towel bars can be a man’s best friend too. Hung at the end of a kitchen island help to keep tea towels at bay while displayed vertically on the wall like ladder rungs, they become a great spot to display magazines and newspapers.
Speaking of ladders, why not use them to help get things off the floor?
