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 goes into T H E D R A W E R.
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.
What does this word “organized” mean? Like…you can find things quickly and efficiently? You don’t lose things after you put them down?
That doesn’t sound right. I’m nearly 40 and I’ve never seen such a thing! It’s a myth!
Honestly I’ve started really evaluating if I’ll ever actually do whatever project the supplies are for and if not getting rid of them (donate, sell, whatever, varies by item).
Will I actually use that piece of scrap? Will I really ever make that thing? Am I ever honestly going to reach for that color/texture? I’ve probably cut my supplies in half doing this, got a few local people into woodworking by parsing things out, and they got to learn on my rejects that cost basically nothing to them. Now I can actually see what I’ve got and do things.
Less stuff makes it so much easier to organize and keep clean.
Having less stuff is my main method.
(assuming you rent) you can use command strips to stick organisers to your walls and use vertical space. You can use some of those stationery organisers and stick it to the wall. In general see if you can use more vertical space.
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.
Bins are the answer. Pick a bin system, make labels, and go to town. The HDX bins from HomeDepot are my favorite, being cheap, transparent, and stackable with different sizes nesting nicely, but go with whatever you like.
Labels can be handwritten on masking tape, from a label maker, or wet erase markers right on the bin itself.
You can stack the bins, use wire shelving, or build your own slide out rack for them.
I printed a modular gridfinity system with drawers for all of my digikey stuff
Nice to see a fellow cyborg! (And if you don’t get the reference and are just a casual enjoyer of the system, that’s cool too)
I don’t, but now I am curious. Please do tell.
Zack Freedman is a big 3d printing influencer who got the system off the ground and has kind of become synonymous with it, most of the gridfinity community discussion still happens on his discord I believe. He wears a custom teleprompter eyepiece thing, calls himself and his community cyborgs, and is neurotically hilarious about puns and alliteration. He’s quite a character.
Ah, him. Yeah, I’ve stumbled across him a few times.
that tends to happen when you leave him strewn across the floor, you should print a gridfinity thing to put him on
My shit? It all goes in the toilet. Never really a problem with organization.
Check out The Container Store if they have those near you.
You in the States?
Start looking around for milk crates. They stack.
They don’t have milk crates in other countries? How do food service workers take smoke breaks?
we have the mythical ability to stand up
They don’t.
Well… since milk crates hold 4 gallons and the rest of the world’s metric… Maybe they sit on fish tubs?
Clear Plastic shoe storage boxes and a label maker. Then for any bigger boxes that are not clear. Label the box and log items in my self hosted asset manager and scan the QR code to list the items in that box.
Clear boxes
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.
