Storage units provide extra space for your belongings. Whether it’s holiday decorations, things you’ve inherited from family members, or items you’ve saved for a rainy day, your unit lets you hold onto it all. However, over time, a storage unit can become crowded and unorganized, making it difficult to find and reclaim items quickly when you need them.
With the arrival of the new year, let’s focus on dialing in your storage unit organization. In this article, we’ll give you our best tips and tricks for how to organize a storage unit.
Take Inventory of Your Storage Unit
The first key to storage organization is knowing what you’re working with. Take some time to review what you have stored in your unit and create an inventory (either with pen and paper or your phone) so you’ll know exactly what is there at a glance.
Pare Down Your Stored Possessions
Make a decision about every item in your unit. Should it stay or go? If the item no longer serves you, now is the time to sell, give away, or toss the item. Don’t let sentimentality hold you back from getting rid of things that don’t give you joy or that you no longer value.
Organizing a storage room tends to be much more successful when all the items in your storage unit belong there. If you find items you no longer want or need, the New Year is a great time to put together a few bags or boxes for Goodwill, Purple Heart, or another similar charity.
Label Everything
Labeling all your boxes is one of the simplest and most powerful organizational ideas. It helps to organize a storage room with labels from the very beginning. If you haven’t already done this, it shouldn’t take long to identify and mark boxes the next time you visit your storage unit. Labeling helps you find what you need at a moment’s notice and makes it easy to add items to the correct boxes or sections of your storage unit.
Group Like Items
It’s important to keep similar items together. After labeling them, place all the boxes of a particular theme in the same part of the storage unit.
For example, if you decorate for the holidays and have several different bins of decorations in your unit, make sure the labeled boxes are neatly stacked and set in the same storage area.
Make a Storage Unit Diagram
Ideally, you’ll want to be able to visit your storage unit and find whatever specific item you’re looking for right away. Having an inventory of your possessions is a good start, but it won’t tell you where a specific item is located.
As you organize your storage unit, draw out a simple diagram that lists where your items are within the unit. It doesn’t need to be fancy or drawn to scale; just give yourself a general idea of where things are.
This diagram will come in handy whenever you want to grab something from your unit. Print a copy to keep in the unit, and keep a digital copy in the cloud for easy updating.
Assess Available Storage Space
After you’ve inventoried your existing storage unit and removed anything you no longer want, take note of how much space is left for new boxes or items, especially if you’re also decluttering your home for the new year.
Consider Potential New Additions to Your Storage Unit
Look around your home, particularly in areas where you have storage space (the basement, garage, and attic, for example). You may find items that should be packed away in your storage unit.
For example, now might be the right time to box up old children’s clothes and toys and move them into the storage unit so they won’t take up space in your closets.
Remember, when you go to take your new items to the storage unit, follow suit with the tips above to label and store your things accordingly. The main secret to organizing a storage unit is making up a process for organization and sticking to it!
Add Shelving to Your Unit
Many self-storage facilities will allow you to bring in free-standing shelving as long as you don’t make any permanent changes to the unit itself. While shelves can be pricey, many people find they’re worth the cost.
Shelves allow you to utilize the vertical space in your unit and make it easier to see your boxes and other possessions. If you want storage organization extra credit, you can even label your shelves with numbers or letters (like they do at home improvement stores) and add these details to your diagram.
Put Most-Used Items Up Front
Even small storage units can quickly become packed with items. To save yourself time and aggravation, put the items you use most often at the front of your unit.
Do you take out your holiday lights every year? Put them front and center. Don’t have room in your house for your grandmother’s old hutch? Push that big boy to the back of your unit.
Create Paths in Your Unit
It may be tempting to use every last square foot of space in your storage unit, but what happens when you need to reclaim that family tea set that’s in the back?
As you organize your storage unit, keep at least one pathway clear so you can easily move to the back. If you have a large or medium unit, consider creating multiple lanes and rows.
Keeping pathways open in your unit will also make future organizational updates easier.
Stay Organized With Price Self Storage
When you need a little more space, self-storage units can save the day, giving you a clean, secure place to keep the items you don’t want to lose or discard. Your personal storage area offers many great possibilities, especially in helping you to reduce or eliminate clutter in your own home all year long.
We hope these storage unit organization ideas help you make the most of your unit. Good storage organization can help you find your stored items more quickly. If you don’t have a unit yet, find the closest Price Self Storage and put a hold on one today!
