Can you help me sort out my entire house? I haven’t a clue where stuff is supposed to go!

[thelegohooverer]

If you were starting from scratch, or moving to a new house, where would you put stuff?

I’m mid way through a house extension and have had to empty or move around most of my belongings for one reason or another. Since everything is moving so slowly with lockdowns, I have time to massively declutter and rethink storage. Up to now I’ve been working off the “where would I look for this first” system but now I’m thinking more about “where should this be kept” ... and I’m stumped

I have lots of storage areas : utility room (soon), under stairs, top of wardrobe, kitchen top cabinets, attic, hot press, bathroom drawers. The problem is that I don’t have a sense of there being different zones or categories, so there can be multiples of the same sort of thing in different places, or things in odd places just because that’s where they’ve always been.

The hallway under the stairs has always been a massively overstuffed coat cupboard, with sports equipment, hobby bags, carpet off cuts, spare tiles, umbrellas, hats, gloves, high viz, shopping bags.... and our hallway is always a mess with coats on the end of the stairs and school bags dumped.

I’m thinking of packing away anything out of season but where should it go? My first thought was the attic but apparently clothes and fabrics shouldn’t be stored there. Maybe the hot press?

What do you keep in your attic? I’m scratching my head over the state of ours. Theoretically anything that ends up in the attic doesn’t really need to be there (but I’m not quite in that head space yet).

Christmas decorations will stay there for the moment. And other seasonal stuff for Halloween, Easter etc. I have some sentimental stuff but again I’m not sure it should be stored in an attic (papers and photos can deteriorate in hot/cold conditions)

I was thinking of moving sentimental stuff - wedding dress, heirloom christening gown and kids art to the top of my wardrobe but that already has my “going out” shoes, bags and accessories. My wardrobe already has to store out of season clothes and current clothes.

I keep our wetsuits under the bed because I can lay them out without folding or hanging so there’s not a lot of extra space there.

There’s all sorts of other things I’m perplexed about - where should batteries live? Shoe polish? Medicines? Stamps?

I know some people are really sensible about these things, but my brain melts a bit trying to figure it out.

Please help me sort out my house! Do you keep certain items together for particular reasons? If you’ve sorted out storage areas or moved house and started from scratch I would love to hear any tips.

We keep out-of-season clothes and spare duvets, Christmas decorations etc in the loft. Been doing it 35 years+ and never had a problem, so I don't know why you think clothes shouldn't be stored there.

Don't keep things like swimming costumes in the airing cupboard for months on end - the sheer dryness makes elastic and lycra give up the ghost.

They go in a bottom drawer in the bedroom (under scarves in the winter and on top of scarves in the summer).

We are just renovating our house and my aim is to end up with clean kept well away from dirty. So we will have a boot room where dirty things like shoes (and shoe cleaning stuff), pet stuff and pet food etc is kept and then a separate laundry room where all clean stuff is kept (i.e. washing, sewing machine, cleaning products etc). My current bugbear is trying to move clean washing around in an area which the dog and cats have claimed and so is constantly getting dirty.

Our decorations etc go in the loft. So do seasonal clothes eg wet suits, ski stuff etc.

My wedding dress is in the wardrobe in a spare room at MIL's house.

Ask parents/other family members if they can store heirloom garments for you.

Start with a big Declutter, clothes first. There’s probably a lot of clothes you don’t wear.

Yep, start with decluttering so you're left with stuff that you do actually need space for.

I'm a big fan of dual purpose furniture so when I bought a new bed recently I went for an ottoman storage bed. My out of season clothes, travel bag, cards and craft stuff are in there currently (although I want to find a new home for the craft stuff and cards). Ikea also do a long storage box for gift wrap now, think it's part of their Skubb range.

When you are organising stuff, use boxes and containers to corral loose stuff or compartmentalise contents - so for example if you have a utensil drawer you might want all the wooden utensils together, the whisks and baking stuff together and so on. You can get some good organising containers from Amazon, TK Maxx, Wilko even. Or use cut up cardboard boxes if you're on a budget.