One of the biggest things we have struggled with is storage. We have one closet in our whole place, and it is in the bedroom. To top it off, that closet isn't even quite full sized, so we have had to be a little bit creative as far as finding places for things that would otherwise go in a closet.
We are lucky that in our laundry room we have a few shelves above our washer and dryer that we can use for seasonal stuff like our Christmas tree and camping gear. We are also lucky that we have two shevles above the rod in our closet that have been useful for storing a few extra big things that can't hide in plain sight!
Living Room:
When we first started looking for a place, we didn't really know exactly how big or small our place would be, so we started to refinish a small table we planned on using as a coffee table. Once we found our place and bought the rest of our furniture, we realized it was going to look small and ridiculous in the space, so we had to improvise. This actually turned out to be a good thing, as we started to look at multi-use coffee tables. Coffee tables are stupidly expensive for being a piece of wood with legs, so we went on craigslist and found our very nice storage coffee table for 20$!
This has probably been the best thing we bought for 20$ or less. Does it have a few scratches on it? Yes. Does it matter? Not really. At the moment it holds all our games and a few random things that we didn't really have a logical home for, but the storage space is huge and we can always move stuff around and use it for various things in the future! PLUS when one of our friends (or one of us) accidentally scratches the thing, it's not a murder worthy event.
Storage Score: Kyleigh - 1 New Place - 0
Bedroom:
Because we only have one closet and it is in our bedroom and being used for several things other than clothing, we had to be a bit creative in our bedroom as well. Actually, not really creative but we had to compromise on something that we didn't have before. When Alex had the bed at his house he had it boxsprings on the ground, which was fine until I realized we were going to need under-bed storage for some rolling bins I had, plus a few other things like wrapping paper. Alex was not very enthused by this idea as the bed frame brings the bed up about another 6" (which for someone as short as me equates to quite a bit of extra height) but we gave it a try and it is actually working out quite well. The bed is obviously higher than we are use to, but we'll get over it, and it gave us a king size bed's worth of storage!
Storage Score: Kyleigh - 2 New Place - 0 (Alex - 1/2 because he didn't want to do it but did it anyway)
Kitchen:
One of the other unique challenges we have had to face is that we have no upper cabinets in our kitchen. We have four beautiful windows that look out onto our backyard, but as far as enough cupboard space for not only pots, plates and cups, we had to reserve a couple of cupboards for pantry space too.
Needless to say our counter is a little full, but not overly cluttered (I'd like to think anyway). I found some neat countertop shelves at the dollar store that I might go back and get if I find that the counter seems too busy, but it's tolerable for now.
What I did find useful at the dollar store today were stack-able shelves to put in the cupboard for canned goods. Those damn cans take up so much space! I also used a few containers that I had laying around to organize my spice refills and bags of pasta that were floating around in there... I still have some organizing to do, but it's definitely getting easier to find the things I need!
Storage Score: Kyleigh - 3 New Place - 0
For the moment I am winning the storage war... whether I will continue to win it or not is a difficult question, but I'm up for the challenge!
Blog, and be happy!
Kyleigh.
