Storage solutions

One of the things you might be short of when you move into your new home is adequate storage for your stuff. Once you have been through your moving day checklist and decluttered you may still may still have things that at first glance you don’t appear to have room for.

This where a few creative storage solutions will come in handy.

One of the items you may have a lot of are books. They make an excellent way to decorate your living room or home office.

But how do you store all those colourful hardbacks and paperbacks. Here are few tips on things that you can do to store your books and enhance your living space at the same time:

• Use modular shelving to create interesting patterns with your books.
• You could buy a traditional bookcase to match your furnishings.
• Use single shelves with imaginative bookends to keep your volumes in order.
• If you have a lot of books with plain colour spines, colour code your books in order on the shelf so that they match the spectrum to give you rainbow of colour – red, orange, green, blue, indigo and violet.
• Use random unused spaces to insert book shelves - like under the stairs, or even incorporate shelves into your stairs.
• Get a free-standing three-dimensional shelf unit that you can walk around.
• Add some interest to your living space by using shelves constructed at interesting angles.
• Upcycle other items such as old wooden step ladders. Open them out and span shelving between the steps to create a quirky book or storage shelf.
• Cantilever shelves make an eye-catching addition to a contemporary styled room.
• More industrial in your tastes? How about re-using old warehouse racking?
• Take some natural material like a small tree trunk as a centrepiece and radiate shelves in rough sawn wood from it.

It’s not just books that you will need to find storage space for. What about all your CDs and DVDs? Modern living rooms can get cluttered with books and magazines, CDs and DVDs. And TVs can take up a lot of valuable space in the room. Make the TV the focal point of the room and build a series of units around it. Moveable stands with storage space are great or – if money is no object – why not develop a bespoke solution?

If your space is open plan, use storage solutions to divide up the space into different areas.

Alcoves
Alcoves give you ideal space to fill in with seamless floor to ceiling shelving. You could include cupboards with sliding doors to help tidy your stuff away, out of sight. You could also use an alcove to build in a home office, an ideal space for the kids to do their homework. Fit some flush doors to hide the open shelves from view when the space is not in use.

Kitchens
Use every inch of space in your kitchen to maximise your storage. Use pull-out cupboards with shelves and racking or sliding doors on cupboards to make the most of the available space.
Why not investigate multipurpose cubed storage solutions available from major modular furniture and DIY retailers?

Hallways and utility rooms
Halls and utility rooms often get cluttered up with boots, shoes and coats. Why not have a look at hooks, hangers and stands. Modular solutions will help to provide a space to tidy away all those boots and shoes.

Bedrooms
Stuck for storage space in the bedroom? Use the headboard as storage by building in drawers. In children’s rooms, use the space under the child’s bed to stow away toys and clothes. You can nestle pull-out boxes under bed spaces and use narrow shelving solutions to maximise space.

Outside
Some of the things that will take up a lot of exterior space are your bins. There seems to be a bin for everything these days. Keep them together and out of sight with a bin store.

Whatever you chose to do with your storage space, enjoy your new home!