Especially if you have a lot of crafting supplies.
I’m struggling with a lot of fabric, yarn, and various random wooden things I paint. I have a single bedroom apartment and there’s so much stuff that some of it is on the floor.
Everything needs to have a place: box, drawer, hook, jar, bin, anything. If it doesn’t have a place, it’s just going to end up randomly anywhere and everywhere.
You need to decide a fixed place for everything. There needs to be a fixed place for yarns, maybe multiple places for different types of yarn. There should be a specific location for fabrics. If there’s not enough floor space, start using the walls. Even the ceiling is a place where you can attach hooks, loops and whatnot.
You just need to make a hundred little decisions while organizing everything, but once that’s done you can skip the burdensome decisions in the future and simply follow the system you built earlier. Once there’s a system, don’t deviate from it, and that requires some discipline. If following it becomes a routine, you no longer have to spend much mental energy in sustaining it.
Yeah but that requires space, and OP mentions he doesn’t have much.
Screw some shelves on the walls and hooks in the ceiling. There’s so much wasted space out there. Things don’t have to touch the floor, you know.
“there’s always room on the z axis” It always surprises me how much more I can store when I start stacking things. Can make retrieval more difficult, but that’s always a trade off
Exactly. 2D storage sucks. Move to 3D and suddenly you have so much more space. If that’s not enough, you gotta unlock the 4th dimension and start stacking 3D objects like a pro.
Check out The Container Store if they have those near you.
I put things in in storage areas where I think I will remember where they are, then spend 3 days looking for it tearing the house apart when I actually want to use them. Then by the time I finally find them all ambition to do the project is gone so I put it back till I’m ready again. Process repeats.
I printed a modular gridfinity system with drawers for all of my digikey stuff
I am not super organized, but this is what I do to keep myself from being a total slob. The most important thing for me is that every item I have must have a “home” where it goes when not in use.
- Workbench with pegboard backer and overhead light
- Lots of cheap 4 or 5 tier shelves
- File cabinet for paperwork
- Hardware stores will usually sell a cheap 4 pack of various size toolboxes that come nested inside each other. i use these for everything. I keep buying the same brand so they stack nice with each other. I also use shoe boxes a lot.
- Gotta cull the collection every once in a while
At work, I use the teams equivalent of a trello board to keep track of where inventory is in the warehouse.
IKEA Kallax with a combination of insets of drawers and doors and boxes that fit my particular needs. They are cheap and easy to assemble and weigh next to nothing because they are made of some kind of pressed cardboard material but they still look quite all right.
I don’t? I just have misorganized spaces
I don’t know if any of these will help, but I hope they do. I’ve found ways I didn’t know to store art equipment by watching similar videos.
I have a corner that seems to attract most of my things.
“Leave it a little better than you found it.”
There is no grand system, no master organization that can’t be defeated by just junking everything away.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Take 5 minutes at the beginning and end of each session to make your space a touch better. That’s how you “keep” things in order.
Do you mean physically or inventory?
Physically. Inventory would be smart, to stop me from buying shit I already have, but I’m worried that my apartment is in the early stages of something from Hoarders.
Other complication right now is that I’m still recovering from surgery - standing for fifteen minutes fatigues me and bending over is painful. It sucks, because I had taken off a week for cleaning at the end of last month and spent all of it in bed sick with the thing that sent me to the hospital.
If you’re not a stranger to docker, you can run something called homebox.
https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox
I use it for my home inventory and insurance.
Especially since you’re on a low physical activity recovery time, this is the perfect time to deploy and start to look at receipts and locations.
70% of the work is administrative that you can do sitting down. You’ll go through your emails or receipts and start scanning and inventory them.
Or you can just look at labels to look at how you want to organize everything. A solid inventory base is better in the long run, just takes a lot of effort to get started.
Physically I use stackable crates to organize everything, I use Hay crates, but many other manufacturers do the same thing.
