Bedrooms are often pretty small, and they’re extremely prone to getting messy and cluttered. And when a room is messy, its storage capacity drops drastically—which can create a self-perpetuating cycle of messiness, making your storage inefficient, which makes the mess even worse.
Sometimes merely organizing your bedroom isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to add storage capacity. But how do you do that while avoiding clutter? Let’s take a look at some helpful bedroom storage hacks.
Curate “Empty Zones” for Visual Contrast
Think about texture in food and how powerful it can be to contrast different textures. A crispy crust makes bread so much more satisfying because it complements the soft inside so delightfully.
You can do this visually, too. By curating a few “empty zones” in your bedroom, you are creating a contrast of textures, and your mind will be able to perceive the room as clean and orderly even if you have a lot of stuff in there.
Try to keep one or two walls in your bedroom as empty as possible—perhaps with nothing more going on than a chair and a hanging picture. You can emphasize this by painting the empty wall a more vivid color.
Do the same thing somewhere on the floor. An area rug is a great excuse to have a patch of floor space with nothing else going on, but you can also leave this part of the floor completely bare for an even cleaner look.
Give Your Closet a Makeover
Closets are usually a bedroom’s main storage, so your closet needs to be clean and functional in order for the rest of your storage plans to work. By organizing your closet, you can maximize bedroom storage while minimizing clutter.
Adding closet shelves, drawers, racks, and cabinets inside your closet can multiply your closet’s effective storage space—all pleasantly hidden away behind the closet doors.
Upgrade Your Closet Doors
Speaking of those closet doors, you don’t have to settle for a conventional swing-open door. You can install a lateral-opening closet door system instead.
Lateral-opening doors, when they are open, sit against the wall to either side of the closet. That wall space needs to be kept clear—unless it has recessed features like shelves or bookcases. But what you lose in wall space, you gain in floor clearance: Lateral-opening doors don’t swing out as far as traditional doors do, making them great for tight spaces (e.g., if your bed is relatively close to the closet). This reduced clearance can even help you to free up floor space elsewhere in your bedroom.
But the main advantage of lateral doors is their style: If you put a lot of work into your closet’s organization and want to be able to display it, or if you need to frequently get things from your closet, then lateral doors are the way to go because lateral doors look the best when they’re left open.
Make Use of Vertical Storage Space with Wall Shelves & Furniture
Vertical storage is your best friend when it comes to storing belongings without causing clutter. There are so many different ways you can turn a wall into a tasteful storage center:
- Wall shelving
- Freestanding bookcases (they can hold more than just books)
- Bedroom hutch
- Armoire
- Chest of drawers
Use that vertical space to its full potential. Don’t stop at eye level. Keep it going all the way up to the ceiling if you can. (You can install shelves above articles of furniture like chests that are only a few feet tall.) While the highest shelves won’t be reachable without a stepstool, they’ll make a great place to store things that you don’t need to use very often. Just be sure not to overdo it: Limit your floor-to-ceiling storage to just one wall in the bedroom.
Hide “Busy” Areas with a Curtain
While many people feel that wall storage, such as shelves, bookcases, and hutches, looks cozy and tasteful, other people might find it to be a bit much.
If you’re the type of person who finds a wall full of shelves to be too “busy” from a visual standpoint, you can conceal this with a floor-to-ceiling curtain that runs the length of the wall. Since the pandemic, many people are doing this to conceal home offices that they’ve set up in their bedrooms.
Use the Space Under the Bed
The bed is a sunk cost in a bedroom’s footprint. It’s going to take up a huge amount of space, and there’s no getting around that. It’s what a bedroom is for, after all.
But you can still think vertically! Nearly all of the space underneath the bed can be used for storage. If you’re in the market for a new bed frame, consider getting one with built-in drawers underneath. Alternatively, you can slide storage chests underneath an open bed frame and conceal them with a stylish bed skirt.
Under-bed storage is typically a little less convenient to access, so it’s better suited for storing things that you’re not using every day.
Refresh Your Space from Time to Time
Lastly, don’t be afraid to shake things up every once in a while. Declutter the space, let some things go, and consider giving your bedroom a makeover. It’ll free up space for the things you do want to keep.
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