September 25, 2008

Adventures in Storage

I've been living in the same apartment for 12 years. In that time I've become pretty good at living with one closet, one sink, one guitar-obsessed husband, 2 cats and lots of stuff. I wouldn't say I'm a pack-rat, but I'm certainly no minimalist.



I had always assumed that our place was about 750 square feet -- I think that's what the landlord told me and I just never bothered to check. So when my husband and I started looking for a place to buy, we finally measured our apartment and found that we had actually been living in 498 square feet. Overnight things seemed almost unbearably claustrophobic!

What a great time to start my jewelry business, salt & paper, quite literally on my kitchen table! Storage became a huge issue almost immediately and so I found what seemed to be the only space left in the entire apartment and put it to work. The 9 inch gap between my pots and pans and my kitchen cupboard became my bead library. I installed a 1" x 3" plank as a long shelf. The original plan was to recycle baby food jars, but that would have required our consuming a lot of baby food (sans baby) so I finally bit the bullet and ordered cases of empty plastic jars. I organized everything by color, and filled up the shelf. I also added a magnetic strip (used to hold chef knives) to keep all my tools at hand, and making it easier to spot when my husband "borrows" some pliers to restring a guitar.



And just when I got everything organized... we found a house.
Today we closed on our new house, which is just over twice the size of our current place!

-natalie
www.saltandpaper.etsy.com

5 comments:

see steph sweat said...

congrats on the house!

waisze said...

congrats on your new home, how exciting!

Anonymous said...

I feel your pain all too well. Sharing a 1 BR with no real workspace except for the dining room or coffee table, at least that is my situation. Congratulations on your new home! How exciting!!!!

MaryAnne LoVerme said...

I love the magnetic strip idea!

Anonymous said...

Congrats on your closing! Think of all the organizing you can do in your new home!