Maximize your Storage Space with These Organization Tips
Each and every one of us does spring cleaning, fall cleaning and maybe, sometimes, even winter cleaning! Summer, not so much…
Just the other day, a customer came into my office; raising her hands up in the air, she exclaims, “Oh, my, I had to organize my storage unit, and my head office in Toronto was nice enough to send me a young fellow who was very helpful. But, alas, he has organized everything in such a way that only he will know how and where to find things!”
I looked her in the eye, and, smilingly, I assured her that there is nothing that cannot be fixed! I gave her a couple of tips about “re-organizing” her unit’s shelving, but, she shook her head, and said, “I don’t know where to start from!”
I handed her a black marker, and asked her to purchase a couple of large, medium, and small boxes. Armed with these items, she went into her unit and started working on her project. The tenant is a sales representative who visits her storage unit maybe twice a month, and so I advised her to mark the boxes she would be using on a weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly frequency. Inside her unit, fortunately, are wall-to-wall free-standing shelves, which provides her work area with the extra space needed to get all her items sorted out neatly, before storing them away.
Within a couple of hours, I had a beaming lady walk back into my office! She gives me a hug, and says, “Wow, that wasn’t so bad after all! I have now marked the boxes, placed these in the order you suggested, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief! I know what I will need for every trade show I come for, as everything is now marked and ready to go.” I was so happy for her, too!
This is just one of the many stories about how we help our tenants out on an everyday basis.
You see, we need to look through the items in our closets, in our kitchen, in our garages, and most importantly, our storage units! We collect so much over the years that, very soon, these spaces become too cluttered. We still need the use of the space we have, it’s just that the items which we don’t need have to be either donated, or taken to an appropriate place of disposal. (Every city has a disposal facility for the use of the community).
For families, let’s make it a team effort: have every family member come by on a Saturday afternoon, and make it a fun event! Having personally passed an afternoon doing this with my grown-up kids, it was definitely enjoyable going through years of family photos, skates, bicycles, books, old Halloween outfits (long outgrown, but still in that box marked “Halloween”), souvenirs from past New Year parties (like those tiaras which read “2000”!) and so much more—there’s always fun and laughter with a project like this!
A special thanks goes to Isabelle Schucroft for contributing her story!
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