Small apartment solutions

Can those of you who have lived in or do live in smaller spaces please post some of your ideas and solutions that have helped. I went from living in my mom's house which had a full basement and Dh lived in his apt which had 7 closets including 2 walk in anda HUGE storage room to a small apartment with virtually no closets.

This is one of the reasons that after a year we're having such a hard time making it a home. We've been struggling with it. We recently went through our stuff and threw out i would say about 30 bags of garbage. We also sent some stuff to our offsite storage unit.

A few specific issues we're having-

1) Where to keep laundry. We don't have a laundry room here and our bathroom is actually too small for a hamper. I have a small hamper in my bedoom but right now we have our laundry in these hamper things in our hallway between the bedrooms and the kitchen (if you had grandparents who lived in railroad apartments in brooklyn and queens, that is our apartment.

2) Garbage - We have paper recycling, cans and garbage, right now in bags all over our galley kitchen. I have no sane place for a garbage can, let alone 3. Maybe I could fit one small one. I don't have enough cabinet space to put it under the sink without interfering with everything else.

3) Spices. I can't find a spce rack that holds enough, and i don't know where to put it.

4) Off-season clothing? Ugh. No idea.

A few things we did do
1) Got an offsite storage unit for like childhood stuff we never use but won't toss, like DH's comic books

2) Put in storage everywhere. I got over the door storage for the back of my pantry and closet door to fit more stuff.

3) Got rid of a lot of CD DVD and Video game cases. We threw away hundreds of cases and put everything into those sleeve binders. It's not as pretty, and right now I don't know what's in which binder, but we really don't havethe she;lf space and piles od DVDs on the floor was not attractive.

4) Got a modular closet from IKEA.I actually had this at my mom's house. i fitted it with room for handing clothes, baskets for shoes, and shelves for miscellaneous. It's a mess rihgt now, but it stores a lot. it's currently in my office.


Does anyone have any thoughts to share?Pics would be great, too! I just feel so stuck sometimes. i LOVE our apartment and it's actually pretty large in terms of square footage, but it's light on places we can actually store things due to the layout and lack of closets.

Thanks!

Re: Small apartment solutions

No advice, but this is a cool video on a small apartment small apt

Re: Small apartment solutions

DH and I used to live in a one bedroom apartment in the city for years before we bought a house, so I understand the frustration.

1. Laundry - If your bedroom is big but lacking in storage, could you just buy attractive, large hampers, and keep them in a corner of your bedroom rather than in the hallway? Like the nice wicker ones they have at Bed, Bath, and Beyond? Or if there are no room for large hampers, could you just use laundry bags? We used to use laundry bags... they take up less space. Maybe you could fit one at the bottom of your closet and/or hang one on the inside door of your closet. Or, if you have a large bedroom, could you spare the space to make a corner of it a laundry space? You can buy one of those screens to block that corner of the room from site, and then keep hampers, laundry bags or baskets, maybe a folding table, etc. in that area, neatly organized, but blocked from site?

2. Garbage/recycling - Where do you have to take it? Do you have to keep the recycling in your apartment, for example? We used to have a garbage room on each floor, so if we had something to be recycled, we would just go put it in the room instead of having it pile up in the apartment. Then, I would just keep one large garbage can in the galley kitchen, against the wall -- It took up space (I'd have to move it when I needed to open the oven), but it was the best spot for it. If you can live with a smaller garbage can, could you fit one under the sink, or maybe even 2 small ones (one for recycling, one for trash)?

3. Spices - I cook a lot, and when I lived in the city, we put up little shelves on any free kitchen wall space to store spices (b/c there was no counter space for them). I know they shouldn't be exposed to light, but there was one tiny window in the kitchen, and it was northern exposure... my spices kept fine. If you don't like that idea, could you dedicate a drawer in your kitchen to them, and lay all of the bottles flat in a drawer? If not, another idea would be to add pieces in a room adjacent to your kitchen that could serve as additional storage for the kitchen. We had a dining area right outside the kitchen that opened into our living room. So we had a sideboard piece and a corner piece that I used to store extra servingware, small appliances that I didn't use every day... you could even get a baker's rack and then maybe you could move some stuff out of your kitchen to make room for everyday essentials like spices.

4. Off season clothing - Could you do under bed storage? Buy flat bins that fit under the bed and store things like winter sweaters in there? Or maybe buy an armoir, if you have wall space but not closet space in your bedroom? Or even buy regular sized storage bins and stack them at the bottom of your coat closet, or (worst case), stack them in your bedroom, put a table cloth over them, and call it another night stand, end table, etc.

Also, I would try to get multifunctional things - for example, buy a storage ottoman that has a lid that can become a tray top, so you can use it as a living room coffee table to serve food and drinks, but also store things within it.

Good luck!

Re: Small apartment solutions

I used to live in a small apt. For laundry I kept it in a rubbermaid bin in my closet. Out of sight and the bin made it easy to carry to the washer. Under that bin was another rubbermaid bin with off season clothes, sweaters/shirts only, pants stayed hanging all year. I had a very small wardrobe.

My other thought on that for you was maybe an under the bed box? Not terribly convenient and you're probably using that space already but...

For recycling we used a tiny tiny container and put it under the sink. We took it out pretty much every other day, but our recycling center was down the hall so it was easy.

For a spice rack we had a wire one that screwed into the wall. It had 3 shelves all connected and worked well because it fit bottles of various sizes.

One advantage we did have is that childhood items and things like that were kept in my parents house.

Good luck, it's not easy, but you'll find something that works eventually.

Re: Small apartment solutions

we are in a decent apartment, but a few helpful places to store things are of course under the bed and also we have some kitchen things on top of the kitchen cabinets (things we dont use often of course)
We store off season clothing in a suitcase

Re: Small apartment solutions

We have a very small NYC apartment that is our vacation home and it has been interesting figuring out how to make the space work.
We have 4 closets that are pretty small.
We do not have underbid storage yet, but I can see it in our future. I also purchased a few pieces of multifunctional furniture which frees up a lot of floor space. I honestly don't cook there very much so I don't have a ton of kitchen stuff, if we lived there full time I would need a piece of furniture with storage to keep more kitchen stuff. Our kitchen doesn't even have one drawer!
The hardest things you mentioned are trash and laundry. Our bathroom had a builtin hamper from the 50s but i ser people must have been much smaller back then because i dont even think one pair of my pajama pants would fit in it, never mind a few days of clothes. we took it out when we redid the bathroom. now we have a small laundry basket in our linen closet and when it's full which doesn't take long I either go downstairs and wash it or I take it home to long island if I'm leaving that day. I do laundry much more frequently when I'm in the city
As for trash we have a really tiny kitchen, I have a small trash can that I have to move if I want to use the oven and I hang two small store bags on our doorknob for recyclables. When they are full, I walk them to the trash room on our floor.
Basically I feel like apartment living has taught me to be more efficient. Our long island home has a lot of space
and storage and I feel like I let things build up more in a way.
My mom lives in a really tiny house and she uses her off site storage for off season clothes, shoes, coats and all seasonal stuff. She has those cardboard Wardrobe boxes from a moving company that she has cedar blocks in, she just hangs everything up in them and she can see it if she needs it. It's a PITA to switch everything but it helps her to
stay more organized.

Re: Small apartment solutions

I feel your pain with the small spaces. DH and I lived in a tiny studio basement apartment the 1st year we lived together, and it was tough to combine all of our things into such a small space.

For laundry, these may come in handy if you have a closet (or a space where you can install a railing to hang these up).

1





For recycling, do you have space to have a stackable storage center? I saw this on amazon, and thought that might help, especially if you had a shelf to store this on, or a closet to tuck this into.







Spice Rack- Check out the magnetic ones. You can have as many spices as you want, and saves precious counter space lol (plus this is an easy DIY)








also, I have a ton of the under the bed storage bins where we keep our winter apparel in. I'm able to stack them 3 high, and have about 12 under our bed right now. I also keep important documents in there such as receipts, statements etc.

Message edited 5/29/2012 7:34:30 PM.

Re: Small apartment solutions

i have my seasonal stuff in a rubbermaid on the floor of my closet and i switch it out when the seasons change.

we have 2 garbage cans, one for reg garbage, one for recycling.

i keep meaning to look into that spice rack thing they sell on tv that is a space saver, but i havent gotten around to it.

otherwise, we keep a looot of stuff in my moms house!

Re: Small apartment solutions

when i moved into my condo they had wire shelves installed on the inside of most closet doors, amazing the amount of space it added


eta- this is not one of my closets but i use our shelves for alot of smaller items that have no real home, stuff like sunscreen, jewelry cleaner etc.

good luck

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Message edited 5/29/2012 8:15:49 PM.

Re: Small apartment solutions

LOVE these ideas! I love those magnetic spice jar things.

My living room and dining room are big, bedrooms are TINY, so the hamper thing is kind of out. I'm going to thnk about reshuffling my closet to fit some kind of laundry solution.

It's incredible how much laundry the two of us make considering that his work clothes go to the cleaners and I mostly work from home so I wear a lot of just like yoga pants and stuff around the house

Re: Small apartment solutions

Re: Small apartment solutions

oh, another idea - go vertical with storage. use bookcases with pretty baskets/bins to hold stuff, or even bookcases with cabinets on the bottom can be used to store clothing, kitchen stuff, etc

Re: Small apartment solutions

he problem with laundry is that I have to go to my mom's to do laundry which is like a whole huge production

Re: Small apartment solutions

we have two of these
and we just put them in the shopping cart and bring to my moms on laundry day. they take up space in the bedroom but what can you do.

Re: Small apartment solutions

what about a trunk or storage bench for the foot of the bed, and use that for laundry?