It’s a new year and time to get organized. One way to start is to purge and store but what to do with what you keep?
Here are 6 stylish storage solutions to consider.
- Jewelry — Starting Small and maybe using what you have or try an elongated statue or a thrift-shop-find glass case can be the perfect ways to hold bangles and necklaces and earrings. These also allow you to see what you have rather than in jewelry cases, which are still useful solutions but can put your baubles out of sight, out of mind when you might actually like to wear them.
One way to make your jewelry storage or any space pop, is to make a strategic color statement as in this non-traditional sectioned-off paint treatment. Notice that not even the entire is wall painted. The painted paneling allows for this unusual sectioning. As you can also see the monochromatic nature of painting the dresser the same color as the wall, cleverly carries the color up the wall and blends the furniture with the wall as one. The placement of the mirror purposely separates the bold teal color from the contrasting cream. This asymmetrical arrangement works beautifully!
2. Storage Containers — Along with jewelry cases mentioned above, storage boxes and containers can be clever ways to control visual clutter. Here are some not so run-of-the-mill containers that are both functional and offbeat, stylish and simply sophisticated.
The Telegraph in the UK lists five of the best stylish storage boxes and here are a couple.
If you have hat boxes already, you can cover with fabric or even wallpaper to get a similar effect.
Actually, any durable shoe box can be used as is or even painted. Simply spraying an index card with chalk paint and taping on the front to write on and let you know what is inside the box can be a useful hack for this concept.
3. Tackling the Kitchen – can be a difficult task but as each one of these storage ideas leads into the other, you can use boxes as well as glass containers for stylish storage. Glass coverage in the kitchen can save you time because you can immediately see where things are that you want to use, however it can also create visual busyness. Depending on your kitchen style, you’ll have to asses what works best for your own needs.
4. Open Storage – is another solution, like open shelving where your storage is very visible but efficiently contained in organized groups. Even those open shelves can provide concealed solutions like this innovative shelf drawer within the shelf itself. This takes leaving no wasted space unused to a new level.
One of my favorite concealed kitchen storage solutions is the toe-kick drawer. This is an often overlooked space that can provide a lot of storage for flat and hard-to-store-sized items as well as those you might want to make hard to find like your silver or holiday linens that are not used all the time.
5. Small Spaces – pose their own problems. Living with this scenario nearly forces you to be organized and look at every potential opportunity as above for storage solutions. Even when all the solutions above are used there are other decorative ways to make a small space look larger.
Using stripes can visually trick the eye into thinking the space is larger than it is. This can work with vertical stripes, making the space appear taller and useful for low ceilings or horizontal stripes that make the space appear wider than in reality. Horizontal stripes can work well with open shelving by incorporating the lines within the stripes and blending them in visually.
Another trick, much like the monochromatic color punch as in the dresser and wall earlier, is to extend the color and or pattern onto the ceiling. This tactic opens the frame of the room and your mind doesn’t immediately detect the boundary that the ceiling would normally form. This also adds visual interest.
5. Books – Bookshelves would be your first and obvious storage solution but you may not want the visual clutter that this can sometimes bring. Using a curtain to cover up, also seen above, can provide a presto-chango type coverup. If you like to change up your decor this can be one of the more practical and brilliant solutions that may feel hidden in plain sight, making one think,”Hey, why didn’t I think of that before?!”
Let’s say you don’t have a lot of books but items you might want to showcase but that wall space behind the bookshelves seems vacuous. One solution that is easier than paint is peel and stick wallpaper, as seen with this Groovy Gate from the Libby Landon Collection.
You may have too many books than storage or not have bookshelves to store them. But if you have stairs, you have storage with this type of display. This arrangement can even be used until you have time to put those books away. That’s another resolution for the new year — time to do it all in! 😉
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