Getting organized is an important step in becoming an adult. You’ll probably hear plenty of apartment living advice from family and friends when you move into a student apartment, though you’re never truly prepared when you realize the apartment is cramped. If you need a student apartment immediately and everything else gets filled up, you may have no choice, but to take what’s essentially a hole in the wall. Here are few organization tips designed to help you overcome the size of a small apartment.
These dinky apartments might come too close to living in a closet, yet they ultimately save you money on rent. Your biggest challenge is finding some comfort in such a place, especially when you have a roommate living with you.
Yes, organization could become a nightmare in such cramped quarters. It’s why you need to think of some ingenious organization methods before your apartment becomes too chaotic. Once you start experiencing the issue of losing things due to lack of organization, it could become a domino effect and stress you to the point of affecting your grades.
Organizing Your Living Room Area
If you live in a small apartment, it’s likely your living room has barely enough room for sitting and placement of vital items for you and your roommate. When you’re both admittedly unorganized and merely set important items down wherever it’s convenient, you’re asking for trouble. Things like keys, bills and other essentials for living life could go missing when you pile them together on one table.
For your keys, place hooks on a wall near your main entrance so you’ll never lose a key again. Your mail needs equal organization, and envelope holders are cheap to buy and don’t take a lot of room. Buy two of these so any personal mail goes in your own area to avoid anything going missing. You don’t want your electric bill disappearing either if you accidentally placed it in a pile of trash.
Organizing Your Kitchen Space
A disorganized kitchen is even worse, because things could get misplaced at a time when you need an essential utensil while preparing dinner. You also have the danger of unsanitary food preparation, if your roommate has a bad habit of leaving dirty items sitting on the cupboard.
Your best organizational step is placing hooks up on the walls for all the most essential pots and pans. Just buy the kitchen tools you absolutely need since you likely won’t cook elaborate, gourmet dinners while in college.
When you’re short of shelves or other storage space for utensils, use empty cans for storing those items. You can even paint them after removing the labels so they blend in with the color of the kitchen. They look attractive enough, save money and they make grabbing certain kitchen tools extremely easy.
Also consider portable metal shelving units that set easily on the floor. This keeps more items off the kitchen cupboard for more food preparation efficiency.
Organizing Your Bathroom and Bedrooms
Most likely, you have to share your bathroom with your roommate if living in cramped quarters. Don’t underestimate the power of closet space and how you can store things in closets or similar storage areas in a bathroom or bedroom. Much of this comes in hanging hooks or pouches behind a closet door where you have enough space to store all the small items that get in the way on bathroom counters.
The worst situation is having bathroom items all mixed together around the sink area and not finding a set of tweezers or a nail file when needed. It’s the same in your bedroom. Each bedroom can easily become disorganized when you place far too many items on top of a set of drawers.
Buy plastic containers to store bedroom items in and place them under your bed so you have more floor space. Consider that in a cramped space, you shouldn’t have storage containers sitting around in places where you could easily trip and get hurt in the dark.
Have you lived in a small apartment? How did you stay organized? Do you plan on moving into a small apartment? What are some of your additional organization concerns? Let us know about them in the comment section below.
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