The tiny home revolution took the world by storm. While the storm isn’t raging quite so hard these days, it left a lot of creative storage hacks behind in its wake. Many of them just make sense no matter how big your home is.
If you’re looking for fun, fresh and innovative ways to boost the storage potential of your home, you might want to try adapting one or more of the following tiny home storage hacks.
Overhead Shelves on High
If your home is blessed with overhead space, then you need to use it. Overhead shelves are a great way to store items in boxes and totes. You might want to even consider investing in crank-down or pull-down shelves. They have clever mechanisms that let you keep the shelf securely up high when you don’t need it. Yet you can pull it down in mere moments when you need to retrieve something.
Folding Tables & Sliding Flat Surfaces
Pull-out cutting boards were all the rage in the 1980s. They’ve found a new home and reinvigoration in the Tiny Homes Movement as a great way to temporarily expand counters and table spaces. It’s especially handy if you have particularly deep lower cabinets in your kitchen or other parts of your home. A great way to add functional workspace in a kitchen or set out food for buffet-style family meals.
A Sink Cover for More Counter Space
The kitchen sink can take up a lot of real estate on most kitchen counters. Yet when you look at a lot of RVs and tiny homes you find that they have a piece of matching counter material sitting flush over the top of the sink. It’s a perfect place to stash condiment holders, a vertical paper towel holder, and other lightweight essential items.
If you don’t have matching counter material, a custom cutting board or a section of butcher block will get the job done. It can also be a visually appealing way to transform your sink into a temporary counter space.
Hang Your Hooks High
When you stop to think about it, a lot of things like pots, pans, and larger cooking utensils have some type of loop or hook in the handle. This means you can install heavy-duty hooks in your kitchen ceiling to hang these items up and out of the way. It might even make more room in your drawers once you take out bulky things like the inconvenient potato masher!
Capitalize on Corner Space
Corners are a natural event of two walls meet, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be wasted space. If you have parts of your house with deep corners behind shelves and end tables, think about adding a lazy Susan or two. Many are visually tasteful and can be a great way to display items, while still making it easy to get what you want with a gentle turn.
Shelves That Tower Over The Toilet
There’s a lot of wasted space above most bathroom toilets. While it might be fun to hang a painting or an inspirational phrase, most of the time this wall space goes unused. So, why not stand up some shelves or install a small cabinet over the tank? It’s a great place for storing spare rolls of toilet paper, hair care products, and extra bathroom accessories that need to be kept away from water.
A custom cabinet or shelving unit lets you set the space up to meet your specific needs. All while ensuring that you can still easily access the guts inside the toilet tank when/if you need to.
Murphy Beds Maximize Bedroom Space
Do you have a kid who needs their space to spread out on the floor for play or simply to create? Yet they are challenged by a small bedroom. Swapping out their traditional bed for a Murphy bed makes it easy for them to play on the floor by day and gives them a sound structural bed by night.
This is a common bedroom hack used in a lot of tiny homes. It’s also the sort of thing that will have other kids oohing and awing when they come for a sleepover!
Divide & Conquer Your Drawers
Kitchen drawers, dresser drawers, bathroom drawers and even the notoriously clutter junk drawer can all benefit from drawer sliders and dividers. Drawer dividers, like you, sometimes find in a utensil drawer to keep forks from intermingling with knives and spoons can also be installed in a wide range of other drawers.
If you have particularly deep drawers in your kitchen, bedroom, or bathroom, you might want to consider installing a custom sliding insert. This gives you a top level to keep everyday items in their proper place. Then you can slide it back to get at more bulk storage below.
Lift Your Couch to Slide Things Under
Are you cursed with a couch that’s low to the ground? Do you have a family member or two who makes an uncomfortable groan when they get off the couch? Then why not kill two birds with one stone, by lifting up your couch with risers and possibly adding drawers under the couch itself?
All the lower space created by lifting your couch by 6 to 8 or even 12 inches is perfect for storage. You can slide long, low totes under the couch to store clothing items or boxes full of seasonal storage. Though probably the most appealing option is to have custom drawers installed.
They can perfectly match the frame of your couch with toe-kick facia that matches the décor in your living room. Best of all they provide easy storage for things like extra throw pillows, remotes, charger cables, movie cases, and gaming consoles.
Under Stairs Storage
Tiny homes that dare to add a second floor almost always have some type of innovative under-the-stairs storage solution. It might be drawers that seamlessly integrated with the stringers of each step. It might be hanger hooks below each tread leading down into the basement. Some of the more daring even add doors to create a pantry that hides in plain sight!
