Situation: This laundry room also served as a craft room. The previous owner had designed a built-in work space with cabinets but there were too many items to fit inside the area until they were better organized.
Challenge: There were multiple crafts projects Read the rest of this entry »
Situation: This garage had plenty of built-in storage but a mess was created when we decided to get rid of the off-site storage unit and consolidate everything into the garage. As with most organizing projects, there is usually temporary chaos before there is order.
Challenge: The back wall of this garage had built-in floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall shelves but they were completely full of childhood memories consisting of one large plastic bin per child per year.With three kids all of them at least in middle school, that meant a lot of bins!
Solution: We went through all of the kid’s memory boxes. At first it was very hard for my client to get rid of childhood papers. She eventually became a champ at making decisions and letting go of enough memories so that each child’s memory items could fit into only one to two bins each. This reduced the storage bins from about 6-8 per child to 2 which gave us a lot more space to store items brought from the off-site storage unit. My client did an amazing job learning how to let go. Her kids still have plenty of great memorabilia to discover and uncover later!
Situation: A two-car garage that held a motorcycle and everything else but the cars! I love this case study because it is very typical of the most common garage challenges. There were fabulous built in cabinets, shelves and overhead storage available but they were difficult to access because of everything piled around and in front of them.
Challenge: The garage had served as a work-out room for awhile and then feel into disuse when the owners moved onto other fitness routines. So what to do with the equipment? There was a treadmill, step machine, free weights with incline bench and a punching bag.
Additionally, there were multiple bicycles and surfboards without a specific place to live.
Solution: We created a work-out room upstairs in a spare bedroom and the free weight and bench which are still useful for the new work-out routine will be moved up to that area. The stepper, treadmill and punching bag were donated to the San Pasqual Foster Academy which really needed the equipment to keep the boys happy. This created a lot more space.
We then took it one step further and hung up all of the grown-up bicycles from the ceiling keeping the daughter’s bicycle, mini-car and wagon accessible on the floor. The motorcycle will be sold in the near future to create even more space.
Once the main floor was cleared, we were able to get inside the storage units. We sorted, boxed and rearranged memories and holiday items and put them in the overhead storage area which opened up space in the easy-to-access cabinets.
With the open space, we were able to bring out entertaining supplies to the garage which helped to create more space in the pantry. We also created holding zones for various sports and activities including camping, triathalon, beach etc.
Another cabinet is now dedicated to household supplies bought in bulk.
Even the most ideal kitchens have their share of problems when it comes to organizing and optimizing the work space. There is always at least one problem to solve when creating the perfect storage system for your kitchen. Sometimes you have more drawers than shelves and nowhere to store large appliances. Other kitchens feature massive amounts of shelving with little or no drawer storage.
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