Remember Max Headroom?

Even if you don’t remember the animated icon, the word ‘headroom’ is an important one to remember when you are figuring out where to put all your stuff. Now, about your stuff…the best place to store stuff you don’t need is in the store. That’s right. Just leave it there. Then, if you ever decide you really do need it, you’ll know exactly where it is, and in the meantime, you don’t have to store it, dust it, inventory it, insure it, or trip over it. It’s enough bother to figure out what to do with the stuff you really do need.

So, what do you need?

• A chair
• A bed
• A desk
• A place to keep clean clothes
• A place to keep dirty clothes
• A place setting of dishes
• A place setting of cutlery
• A box for stuff
• + A shelf for books

Necessary stuff X number of people in household

Now add, per household, stuff for cooking, a table to eat at, cleaning supplies and utensils, trash, garbage, recycling containers, a place for outdoor wear, home maintenance tools, gardening supplies. Don’t forget the holiday decorations. That’s it. The rest is just stuff:

Toys that were played with once
Toys that are broken but not beloved
Toys that have been outgrown for years
Sports equipment that hasn’t been used for more than one year
Hobby paraphernalia ditto
Clothes you will never wear again
Clothes you will never mend
Mementos of events that weren’t all that great
Stuff you keep for sentimental value that takes up more than one ordinary cardboard box
Stuff you keep out of guilt
Stuff you bought because everybody else bought it
Broken stuff
Stuff you can’t get parts to
Stuff that might come in handy someday

Notice that the list for ‘just stuff’ is longer than the list for ‘necessary stuff’. And what does all this ‘stuff’ have to do with storage? Well, the less ‘stuff’, the less you have to figure out how to store. Ta da!

Now, about that headroom; you can find it in whatever space you are. There is headroom in the garage both above and below the rafters. Do you use your garage to, ahem, park your vehicles? You can use the headroom above the height of the vehicle roofs to suspend extra storage—just make sure nobody’s going to get conked on the head. How about the space above the hood? There might be room to hang a bike or a kayak from the rafter without scraping the paint on the car. The object of using headroom is to get stuff up off the floor so that only necessary things clutter up the floor space. If you have a lot of long-handled tools, would they be better off hung up on the wall, or in a free-standing upright storage unit? For heaven’s sake, get them up off the floor before somebody gets hurt!

Inside spaces have free headroom, too. Have you really analyzed the space in your closets and cupboards? Are you using the cubic area to your best advantage? Ideally, you want to use up all available space leaving enough room to get things in and out easily, but you want to do it with minimal stacking. It’s best to have shelves only one item high, whenever possible. Stacks of things that need to be unstacked to get what you want, are really inconvenient, and sometimes hazardous.

Happily, there are gadgets galore to help us utilize our headroom as much as possible. Coated wire is one of the world’s great inventions. You can get a coated wire storage doohickie for just about any purpose on earth, but the two most useful types are the extra shelf that stands up, and the extra shelf that hangs from the bottom of the shelf above. Add the little ‘spice’ storage thingies that screw into the inside of your (real wood—not pressed sawdust) cupboard doors and you’ve created very handy storage that maximizes available head room.

Coated wire closet shelving is nifty, too. Many closets today are a far cry from the single-pole-with-a-shelf-above that used to be standard. You can customize your own closet very easily with components from your local DIY store using either standard-length shelves or custom-cut ones. They’re even relatively easy to cut with a hacksaw provided you can stand the sound. There are built-in or free-standing drawer units, too, that are very handy and could eliminate that floor space hog, the dreaded dresser.

As far as storage is concerned, the key is to keep the number of your possessions to a reasonable minimum, and to maximize the amount of space you do have. And some of the most useful space you have is above your head. So, heads up! And don’t forget the stepstool!

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| |