Smart storage strategies

• How to clean out a drawer

To organize a drawer in the most efficient manner, you need to have a plastic bin bag and three shoe boxes or similarly sized containers by your side. Dump the contents of the drawer onto the bed or floor or a table and start sorting the bits and pieces, distributing them like this:

1. Put anything you want to throw away in the bin bag.
2. Place anything you want to store elsewhere in the first box.
3. Put anything worth giving to charity in the second box.
4. Save any candidates for a church fete or a jumble sale in the third box.

Now put everything that’s left over back in the drawer. Then take the bag and the boxes and plan your trip to the dump, the storage facility, your favourite charity or an upcoming fete or jumble sale.

• No cheese, please

The next time you order a takeaway pizza in person, chat up the cashier and ask if you can have an extra box. Pizza boxes make excellent containers for everything from road maps to souvenir newspapers to children’s artwork.

• CD storage

When you have completely filled up your CD rack and you’ve taken to stacking new CDs beside it on the floor, it’s time to put an empty shoe box to good use. Sort your CDs and put the ones you rarely listen to in the box; label each box according to genre of music and return it to its former place (probably on a cupboard shelf). Stack other shoe boxes on top as your CD collection grows.

• Special storage for special stuff

Turn shoe or hat boxes into a treasure box for each member of the family. Covering the boxes in differently coloured contact paper will distinguish them from one another and make them more durable as well. You could also let a child use acrylic paints to paint his or her box. The boxes will ensure that all medals, ribbons, special greeting cards and any other bits and pieces worth keeping don’t get submerged amid everyday clutter.

• Storing gift-wrapping paper

Save long cardboard tubes and use them to store leftover wrapping paper. The tubes can be stored in the corner of a large wardrobe or under-stairs cupboard. You could also attach plastic bag filled with gift cards and spools of ribbon to a tube with a metal binder clamp or a clothes peg. Tape the tubes together with masking tape and group by occasion.

• Jot it down

Perhaps you reorganized your drawers and cupboards a while ago and now can’t remember where you put the measuring tape or box of recordable CDs. Don’t waste time hunting things down. Instead, record their new locations in a notebook labelled ‘where is it?’ Better still, use your computer and save the list on your hard drive so that you won’t have to hunt for your notebook.

• Curtail ‘special offers’ and junk mail

Credit-card companies know how to ensnare new customers — keep up that barrage of offers coming through the mail, unsolicited. You can opt out of receiving credit-card offers and a lot of junk mail by signing up with the Australian Direct Marketing Association’s (ADMA) ‘Do Not Mail’ service at www.adma.com.au. New Zealanders can register with the Marketing Association’s ‘Name Removal Service’ at www.marketing.org.nz and South Africans can contact the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa at www.dmasa.org. However, this won’t stop all junk mail. It will only stop addressed and unsolicited direct mail from member companies.

It’s also a good idea to put a ‘No junk mail’ sticker on your letterbox, and, as a last resort, contact specific companies to request that they take you off their mailing list.