Getting your house in order with cardboard

It has been a year since my wife and I moved into our home.  This should mean that we are happily settled in and living our American dream.  Well, the reality is that we moved into a fixer-upper and have found ourselves living in a bit of a mess for a year. There is simply one part of our house that is never fixed.  Living like this can surely cause a whole lot of stress and even a strain in some areas.  So we have decided enough is enough.  We have mostly fixe dour whole house up but the place seems a bit of a mess.  It makes sense we have literally redone every single room in the home and some times that has been a very serious remodel.  So I want to go over how we saved our home and got it organized quickly with a bunch of cardboard boxes and some shipping supplies.

 

We still had a whole lot of boxes leftover from our move a year ago.  This was nice in the long run but took up a whole corner of our garage right after the move.  I decided to break them down by cutting the tape on all the corners and setting them aside for a year just in case we needed them again. It turns out that this was a good idea.  After we pretty much finished our remodel we saw that we simply had tons of things in different rooms that we never would use again.  So since I broke down all those boxes I ordered some shipping supplies.  Well, this was lots of packing tape and markers so we could put the boxes back together and mark what would go in them. This certainly was a task and took a little while to do.  But then the question was, what do we do with all the stuff when we get it into the boxes. Won't we just have a bunch of boxes sitting around?

 

Well, the answer to this is yes and the best part of this is yes.  They can stack vertically. So what we did was go room by room and stack sort and mark each of the boxes up. We then created a number system of 1-5 on how important the items in the boxes were and how likely we were going to need them in the future.  SO when we stacked them a 5 would mean we would need them pretty often. A 1 would mean almost never. So we took the boxes and stacked them up to 5 high with 5 being on top and that allowed us to have a better idea of how to store them. 

 

The next thing to do was to find out where to store them.  We thought of a room in the house. But that was a waste of a room. Then we thought about the garage but we really wanted to keep both cars in there. So we ended up getting boxes small enough to fit in our attic.  This meant hauling each box up a ladder and that really is not a lot of fun.  But if we are most likely not going to need the items and we could get them out of the way then its worth it. So that is how we organized our home. I hope this idea helps you with yours!