Great Tips for Organizing a Small City Apartment

Growing up in Michigan I easily took for granted something called storage space. Every home donning basements, attics, and lots of closet space, made organizing a home seemingly simple. One could, at the very least, hide all the clutter away. I am a firm believer that there is a junk drawer in every home. Well, Michigan homes generally offer more than one. This luxury came to a screeching halt when I moved to Florida. Simply putting it, Florida homes don’t and really can’t have basements. For some reason they do not find it too important to honor the idea of vast closet space either. Now as if this transition wasn’t bad enough, my husband and I moved to Staten Island, NY. I now live in a tiny apartment which, by the way, cost about the same as living in a four bedroom house in either other state. The apartment consists of one room that I like to call the living room/dining room/kitchen and two bedrooms, one built by us. There are two closest that fit approximately four winter jackets each. The kitchen has one drawer, ONE. And you get one guess as to what that drawer is called, Yup, the junk drawer. Well listen, it was between that or the silverware drawer and which is more important?

I have been force to learn alternative ways of organizing and storing things around the house. I must say I have done pretty well too. I am going to share some of my space saving organizational tips. The all time best thing about my tips is that they are very inexpensive ideas. I happen to be very frugal and one of my gifts is to look around a house and find solutions to my every need, using whatever is already around the house.

It would only make sense to start with the most important room in the house, the kitchen. I enjoy a good sized kitchen with tons of counter space. But what I ended up with is an apartment in the city kitchen. My counter space is the size of a cookie sheet, and because there is no dishwasher this is where we dry our dishes. Of coarse this means I have no counter space. I have one drawer, as I said before, and just a few small cupboards. I have one for mugs and Tupperware lids, one for food, and one for everything else.