AS MUCH AS we all try to live our minimalistic, Marie Kondo-inspired dreams, clutter does seem to be an inevitable part of life.

Over the years, things simply accumulate — clothes, crockery, books, souvenirs — and you end up scrambling around looking for any unused space in your home. And while ‘decluttering’ advice can often be helpful, finding an efficient way to store things that are important to you isn’t as simple as just throwing away all of your other possessions. 

The good news is that there are lots of small things you can do to maximise the space available in your home, and these things add up to create more storage space than you thought you had before. 

This week we’re looking at some hacks you can use to make household storage less stressful. 

Make the most of your furniture

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When it comes to optimising your home for storage, you can’t do better than plush ottomans with lift-up tops that open up to reveal storage space inside. Other furniture-based solutions include opting for things like nesting tables, which take up only a small amount of space compared to how much use you can get out of them.

There are other smart choices you can make. For example, if you have a coffee table with  space beneath it, you can cover it in a stylish throw that drapes to the ground, concealing the space beneath the table where you are ingeniously storing things you thought you didn’t have space for. 

Have a strategy for bulky items

When it comes to storage, one of the biggest nightmares is bulky items that get a lot of use — for example, heavy winter coats in the rainy months of the year. Hanging these coats under the stairs, on the back of a door, or on a coat rack is a guaranteed way to lose space in your home.

Instead, you should use divider shelves to separate spaces in your wardrobe. Create a small space in your wardrobe specifically for bulky items. Keeping these things behind a closed door will mean that they’re not getting in your way as you move through your home.

When you’re not using bulky clothes, or indeed bulky items more generally, one of the best hacks is to keep them inside a suitcase. Most people don’t use their 20kg suitcases very often, which means they basically function as free storage for most of the year. 

Rely on your magnetism

One of the cleverest things you can do to keep drawer space free is to install magnetic strips in certain parts of your home, such as the kitchen. The kitchen is an especially good place to use magnetic strips because items like cutlery are naturally magnetic. If you have a range of good silver utensils, these can be handily affixed to a magnetic strip on your wall — not only making them more accessible, but leaving more room in your drawers. 

This can also work in the bathroom, where items like scissors, tweezers, hairpins and other cosmetic things can be attached to a magnetic strip. 

Go vertical

We often forget just how much space there is between the floor and the ceiling. Installing vertical shelves, particularly for things like books and photo albums, is especially good for saving floor space by making use of the wall space that might otherwise go unused. 

One very tall set of shelves creates more bang for your buck compared to the alternative of having many cabinets and shelves that only use half of the wall space while taking up much of the room.