When you’re living in a popular market, you know the value of any given square foot of home space is usually very high. If you’ve got a small room, be it a bedroom or a living room, you want to be able to get all the functions you need from it without turning it into a cluttered or cramped mess. Here are some of the strongest space-saving strategies to make the most of your space and still enjoy the look you’ve created.
Where possible, Store “Up” Rather Than Out
While there are lots of trends to do low, wide shelves, small rooms do better with a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf or set of cubbies or drawers. Obviously, you don’t want to go higher than you can reach for day-to-day items, but a very tall set of shelves allows you to store infrequent-use items up high and still not take up the precious footprint of the floor. Stackable furnishings can work well for this effort, just make sure that you assign every cubby or shelf a job, with more in-use items as low as possible.
Use Mirrors and Minimalism to Project Spaciousness
Decorating a small room with mirrors can do a lot to make your space feel bigger, as most strong real estate agents would tell you. Mirrors are not enough if you still fill the whole space with oversized furniture. Aim for the absolute smallest amount of furniture you can live with, and consider all the push-away, and fold-away options: trundle beds under daybeds, fold-up murphy beds, and collapsible tables are all excellent options for making your space feel larger when certain items are out of use. Ultimately, simply not overfilling the room will have the biggest impact – don’t add four chairs if you really need two!
Wall-Mounted Shelves and Surfaces Create Functional Levels
People sometimes dislike the look of stacking items to the ceiling, so another option is to add floating shelves and surfaces on your walls, a little above eye level. These shelves don’t eat up the lower “level” of your room, but they allow you to essentially create a “loft” of storage. A beautiful high floating bookshelf can be very chic while also getting those books out of the small room’s main space.
Under-Bed Storage and Storage Ottomans Are Your Friends
An ottoman that is hollow and a bed with a frame take the same amount of space whether you store things in and under them or not. It makes sense, particularly in a bedroom, to get useful drawers for every portion of the bed, since it takes up so much of a small room. When you can store items away and out of sight, you get cleaner surfaces as a result, which has an outsized impact on your small space.
When Everything Has a Place, Decluttering Is Easier
The key next step is to truly assign everything in a small room a spot because if everything shuffles all the time, it takes a lot more brain power to return it to the perfectly organized version of itself. When every cubby, nook, and under-furniture storage bin has a job, you can simply move items back to where they belong, and you don’t even have far to walk in a small room!
