The Home Organization Trend and Extra Storage — Tips for Integration

Busy, sometimes overwhelmed Americans are increasingly interested in improving their home organization. From trying to figure out what sparks joy in their lives to rearranging their books in a rainbow color scheme, millions of everyday people are being inspired by television and online gurus to do better in their own homes.

An integral part of any home organization technique is the strategic use of storage. How can storage — both inside and outside the home — benefit from and add to your home organization plans? Here are five key tips to remember.

1. Excess Storage Helps Inside Storage

Home organization aims to make your everyday life more organized — and therefore more enjoyable, more useful, and more efficient. An outside storage area helps keep your inside storage spaces just so. It can help you create not only an organized storage area but also a system to keep things flowing smoothly.

The pantry is a good example of how to integrate the two. A busy family with working adults, kids, and pets may not have an expansive pantry that can hold all their bulk food items, extra supplies, two-for-one deals, and the particular snacks of everyone in the family. By placing the overflow into a nearby storage unit, the family keeps the pantry well-organized while rotating in bulk items as needed.

2. Not Everything Can Go Away

Just because something doesn’t spark joy doesn’t mean it’s not a necessary item. And just because things don’t fit into a limited space (such as a designated closet) doesn’t mean you can get rid of all the excess.

A homeowner who is too aggressive about organization may end up having to pay for things again — renting or purchasing — when they realize that they really did need the item. This commonly includes categories like tools, pantry items, clothing, sport equipment, or baby gear. And you may end up needing more of a particular category than you expected.

One key to appropriate organization is to understand when you really should opt to keep things even if you don’t want to — for whatever the reason. An extra storage area can help. You might use it as a form of long-term storage or even as a trial run to determine whether or not some things can be discarded or not.

3. Extra Storage Should Be Organized

Renting a storage unit and using it for overflow isn’t an excuse to be messy and haphazard. The same organizing principles used in the house should apply to your outside storage.

This may be as simple and timeless as the idea of grouping like items together. For example, you might group together all your stored tools or group items by season, such as winter sports and holiday décor together. Or you might incorporate the modern trend of using clear stacking containers and a labeling system to make everything easy to spot and easy to use before returning it to its space.

Whatever your method, the more closely you can make a storage unit coincide with the methods used inside the house, the more useful it will be and the more people will be able to use it to organize every element in the family’s home life.

4. Your Organization Needs Are Personal

The idea of using your personal spark of joy to decide what to do with things shows how personal each person’s organization and storage should be. You should neither keep nor discard items based on what other people feel.

If the idea of making art with that collection of wine corks you’ve been saving for years brings you joy, it doesn’t matter if someone else thinks they’re just garbage. Instead, create a way to organize the elements of that future artwork so that when you’re ready to finish it, you have what you need to do so. You’ll also see your progress better, which is its own form of joy.

5. Organization Should Be Inspiring

There isn’t much motivation to do a project like home organizing if you don’t find some larger benefit to it. Getting your craft room organized means you can spend more time creating artistic and fun gifts or home décor rather than spending time trying to weed through all your supplies.

When you look at each organization step as a way to improve your life or bring more happiness to you, the more you’ll enjoy it and the more you’ll keep at it. This applies both to indoor and off-site storage. By organizing your less-used craft supplies, you can enjoy more variety in your hobby — and perhaps even return to some long-forgotten aspect that you may have let fall to the wayside.

By integrating overflow storage using the same organization ideas as your inside storage and giving it your own unique purpose, all your home organization projects will be more successful. Start maximizing your storage opportunities by visiting the wide inventory of storage spaces and locations at North Star Mini Storage today.