Everyday organizers

• Elevated cellar storage

Storing furniture and other large items in a garage or cellar can be risky because of the potentially damp conditions. If you have no choice but to keep precious, old inherited furniture there for a while, safeguard it or any other vulnerable item from moisture by placing it on a wooden pallet and covering it with a large tarpaulin.

If you’re wondering where to find a free pallet, check with your local hardware shop or timber supplier. An alternative platform is a thick slab of plywood that is supported by bricks or breeze blocks.

• Garage air-freshener

Garages often contain everything from hanging bags of clothes to old hats, gloves and scarves. But how can you stop the garage from smelling like a dusty old store room? Banish mustiness with the lava rocks used for barbecues. Just scoop rocks into four or five mesh bags and hang the bags from the garage’s beams. Every few months, refresh the rocks by setting them outside in the sun for 4-6 hours. Lava rocks left out in the sun regularly should absorb musty odours for years on end.

• The wandering shower caddy

You don’t need to confine that most useful of small storage systems, the shower caddy, to the bathroom. You can use it anywhere inside the house to stock items of all sorts — laundry supplies, gardening products, small tools and so on. Just hang the caddy from a doorknob or a sturdy hook or nail on the wall of the garage, attic, workshop or garden shed.

• Looking after anything framed

You should not only store framed photographs and artworks properly to extend their life but also label them as clearly as possible — the latter accomplished by taping a photograph of the framed item to its wrapper (use a Polaroid or the printout of a digital shot). Wrapping paintings, framed prints, lithographs and photographs takes some time, but pays off in the end. Wrap each piece in acid-free tissue paper and sandwich it between two layers of 0.5-cm foam board cut a little larger than the frame. Tape the corners and middle of the board, then wrap the package in brown paper. After taping the paper at every seam, attach the photograph of the piece within.

Extra hint 1: never wrap artwork of any kind in plastic, which can trap moisture and cause warping or the growth of mould.

Extra hint 2: wear cotton gloves when handling an oil painting. Touching the surface (back or front) will leave oils and salts from your hands — substances that can eventually crack or otherwise damage dried oil paint.

• Two ways to hang string

Say that you need to keep three balls of string fairly handy — jute twine for tying together newspapers and flattened cardboard for recycling; nylon garden twine for tying plants to stakes; and coloured string for gift-wrapping. How would you go about saving yourself from fishing around for them in a drawer or tool box? Try these two tricks:

1.  Install three hooks on a wall or on the back of a door, spacing them 13-18cm apart. Now slide a cord or ribbon (or a length of string from the ball itself, for that matter) through each spool and knot it. Hang a ball of string from each hook and your string is easily accessible.
2.  Use funnels instead of hooks. Choose funnels large enough to hold a ball of string and nail the top rim of each to the wall. Put a ball of string in each funnel and run the ends out of the spouts — and you have made a string dispenser that works like a charm.

•  Bank on this one

Bank statements seem to accumulate faster than you can say ‘special interest rate’, especially when you’re so busy you can’t find the time to check them. Try this quick organizational fix: each time a statement arrives in the mail, scan it and save it as a file in your computer. The result? All the information you need and no paper to take up space or waste time searching through. Or, to save paper, request that statements are emailed to you and keep them on your computer.

•  Group like with like

Keep the instruction manuals for all your equipment and appliances in one place, along with certificates of guarantee and sales receipts. And remember to always throw out documents for appliances that have been replaced or sold, to minimize clutter and to make finding what you’re looking for easier.