The stuff in our lives takes up more space than we ever have room for. Spare rooms quickly become full-of-who-knows-what rooms, floor space gets eaten up, wardrobes get crammed full. Eventually, the lack of physical space eats into our mental space, and we’ve got no room left to live our lives. If you want to make some space for you in your home (and your life, because you deserve to live your life), you can. And you can pull it off quickly, like a bandaid. All you need is some quick space saving tips.
Use these 10 quick tricks to your advantage and you’ll be living a pain-free, bandaid-ripped-off, organised life in no time.
Have Less Stuff
The first step is obvious: get rid of some stuff. It’s a sure-fire way to make some space. Less stuff = more space. It sounds too obvious to even worth mentioning, but sometimes we forget about the simple solutions, even when they’ve been staring us straight in the face.
Try having less stuff by getting rid of some, and if you can’t bring yourself to get rid of it, store it.
Let TAXIBOX help you get your stuff out of sight, out of mind (and out of your life). We’ll take it away and store your TAXIBOX at our facility until you’re ready to have it back in your life. Once you’re ready, we’ll redeliver it straight back to you. When it comes to quick space saving tips, this is the quickest.
Stick all the stuff you need but don’t want to see in our storage calculator.
WFHNH (Work from Home, Not Hell)
Working From Home can quickly begin to feel like Working From Hell (cc: your cat on your keyboard mid-way through a critical email). There are a lot of different ways you can make working from home more bearable, but there’s one rule you should treat as gospel. Keep your desk clear.
This is especially tricky when you’re short on time or short on designated space, like, if you’re working from the kitchen table. It’s still possible, though. You just have to develop a system.
Try following these quick space saving tips to maintain a tidy desk/tidy mind:
- Keep only the essentials around
- Make it manageable by designating homes for everything
- If something has to live on the desk, keep it clean (a tray for pens and pencils)
- Maintain a chef’s practice — pack up and pack down every day
Tone Down the Excess
No matter how hard you try, minimalism isn’t for everyone — behind every Pinterest interior design shot is a pile of stuff just out of frame. We all have stuff (there’s no getting around it), but you can at least make a dent in the mess.
Start with the excess:
- Tone down the pillows (they look cool for real estate photos, but not so cool on the floor (where they spend all their time))
- Donate books you’ve already read and will never read again
- Sell clothes you don’t wear anymore
- Store stuff that’s out of season
There’s no point overcrowding your cupboards with the non-seasonal stuff. Staring at your shorts isn’t going to make summer come any faster. Get them out of here until then.
Make a dent in it by storing it.
Respect the Under-the-Sink Stuff
Don’t lie. We all have a habit of cramming the stuff we don’t want to see in the hard-to-reach places — think back of the cupboard or under the sink. It makes us dread reaching in there to get anything. Organising every space (even the spaces you barely ever see) makes everything feel a hell of a lot easier.
Try this ritual, it works every time:
- Take everything out
- Toss the useless stuff you don’t need/want*
- Make a home for everything that’s left
*When taking on Step 2, remember: just because it doesn’t spark joy doesn’t mean you don’t need it. Bicarb soda under the sink might not spark joy for you, but it’ll spark joy for your sink when it’s drain-cleaning time.
If it’s under-the-sink stuff you’re organising, get creative. Use tension rods to hang spray bottles, baskets for cleaning supplies, tiered shelves to keep things itemised. Things like this make awkward spaces a lot easier to manage.
Clean Up Your Digital Space
Don’t know who needs to hear this, but you should turn your phone off every once in a while. Whether it’s Instagram notifications or a group chat that won’t shut up, the internet eats up space in our heads no matter what.
Make some space in your digital spaces by:
- Organising your desktop
- Setting up a low light on your screen
- Avoiding your phone before bed
- Taking some time to turn off the useless notifications
- Unsubscribing from the excessive emails (just not ours — this article was good, wasn’t it?)
Reset on the Reg
Doing a deep clean every now and then is easy. It’s actually sticking to it that’s the hard part. Maintain all the progress you’ve made by setting up some regular resets:
- Set up reminders
- Make lists
- Reset your space every day by putting things away
- Switch up jobs regularly so it doesn’t get tedious
- Try a rotating cleaning roster (with your housemates, if you have any)
Keep in mind that any schedule you set up for yourself should account for all your real-world needs, like spending a day on the couch every now and then. You are only human, after all.
If you need an even harder reset, go big. Switch suburbs, start a new job, move into an entirely new place. Sometimes a complete change of pace is the only solution.
Go Solo
It’s human nature to want to spend your spare time catching up — we don’t get much spare time, so we tend to fill our days off with other people. Spending some time catching up with yourself, by yourself? Underrated.
Make some space for yourself by spending some time with yourself. Go on a solo holiday for time to time; take yourself out to dinner. It’s about time you took a personal day all for yourself; take a book to a cafe and decompress.
Listen to what you need without worrying about what everyone else needs for once. You deserve it!
Store the Stuff You Don’t Want to See
Any stuff that you “need” but don’t necessarily want to see, you should store. We won’t judge you on what you categorise as a “need” — kayaks, tents, a BBQ in the middle of winter — just keep it in control. In storage.
The room that’s full of stuff you’ve never known what to do with? Bin what’s useless, salvage what you can, and store the rest — you decide what’s useless and what’s not. Just put it in a TAXIBOX until that “might-need-it-someday” stuff becomes “I-need-it-today” stuff, then we’ll deliver it back to you.
Have less stuff. Put it in a TAXIBOX and get on with living your life.
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