Design Plans: Let's Talk Storage
Part 4. All of my ideas and plans for adding storage in our new Victorian terraced home, in order that I can fit in the unholy amount of stuff I've accrued over the years and still have cold wine.
For the last ten years, I have had had no worries with where to stick stuff in our house. We were blessed with copious storage possibilities - a garage, a cellar, built in alcove bedroom cupboards, a greenhouse, an outdoor storage box even. Yes, that doesn’t seem like a huge bonus but let me tell you, when we came to move I was appalled at the amount of carnage we had been able to whack inside it. It seems great to have loads of storage but I have come to the conclusion that actually no, it’s not. The more storage you have, the more shit you hoard and as someone who has just disposed of over half of their worldly goods, I can confirm that this is a fact.
When I was cutting down what we owned in order to downsize, I had lots of people message me to tell me about Swedish Death Cleaning. This is a concept whereby you clear through your things in order to make it easy for your loved ones to deal with your possessions after death (bit dismal, but bear with). The reasoning may be a little macabre, but the method of it is a sure fire winner. It focuses on decluttering with purpose - dividing things up into donate, keep and discard. This is actually exactly what I wrote about last year in Design Dilemmas and is the ONLY way to break down what you own into groups that you can deal with effectively.
Design Dilemmas
When it comes to questions that pop into my DM box, there is none more popular than how to plan a room. It’s an age old problem encountered by many. Move into house decorated by previous owner, feel elated at prospect of making your own mark on it, have panic at the amount of work to be done, become overwhelmed by task in hand, have palpitations about implied cost and upheaval, traumatise self by scrolling through countless inspirational Instagram images, leave it indefinitely as too stressful to think about. Yep, been there. Having lived in both new builds and very old houses, I can confirm that this sequence of events applies to both.
You can READ ON by becoming a paid subscriber which means that not only do you receive four free posts a month but you’ll also get an eight EXTRA posts a month (including all my plans for our new home) plus Chat threads so you can join our blossoming community. You’ll be able to access my archive to read ALL of my past posts (including recipes and travel write ups) for the price of one coffee a month. I would thoroughly recommend it!