Once upon a time I moved into a very charming studio apartment with a view of the Hudson River and, when the trees in Riverside Park were bare, the glittering, glamorous shoreline of New Jersey. It was on the fourth floor of a converted Beaux Arts mansion, it had high ceilings and a Juliet balcony, and a closet that could hold exactly one winter coat, a small handheld vacuum, and pretty much nothing else.

No problem, since I’m an avowed capsule wardrobe minimalist with absolutely zero interest and shopping and even less attachment to material things, right?

Wrong! It was…not great in terms of storage, and while I told people I never invited friends over because there was nowhere to sit aside from the bed (partially true—I had a blue velvet loveseat!), I really never invited friends over because my storage solution was to just have everything I owned out in the open, from stacks of freshly laundered towels to reference books I needed for school to coffee mugs that doubled as “kitchen decor” (the kitchen was in the bedroom/living room, and the cabinets were barely deep enough to hold a dinner plate).

This would not be the last place I lived where I had to get creative with storage: from a one-bedroom apartment where I had a separate home office but no closet, to my current home, where the closets are technically not small but also partially inaccessible thanks to a quirk of the layout, I am constantly, constantly wishing I had more closet space. Since I don’t, I did the next best thing: I consulted with experts about the hows, wheres, and whys of putting stuff away when “away” doesn’t really exist.

Be honest

Whether you’re sharing an apartment where the bedrooms are defined by flimsy room dividers or moving into a charming 1920s Tudor with closets that have beautiful crystal door knobs but not enough space to hold more than a few pairs of shoes, the first step in confronting a storage crisis is being truthful with yourself about how much stuff you have and how much stuff you need. According to professional organizer Jessy Smith of Minimizing NYC, who I enlisted last year to help deal with my closet mess, you don’t have to get rid of things you love! In fact, do the opposite. “The most important thing in any organizing project is the purge and letting go of things that aren't serving you, so that you can, to the extent that feels comfortable to you, minimize the stuff that you need to store,” she says.

Dedicate a day or a weekend to just doing this part of the process—don’t worry about where everything will eventually end up. If you love it, keep it. It will find a home in your home. “Ask yourself questions when you’re doing the decluttering phase,” Smith says. “What am I trying to accomplish here? What is my intention in doing this process? What is bothering me about the current situation?” If your intention, for example, is to fit everything you own into a very small space, you might be more rigorous about letting things go. “There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to whether or not you want to hold onto something,” says Smith, “but if you set some kind of an intention beforehand, it becomes a self-reminder of what you’re actually looking to get out of the process.”

Give everything a place—and stick to it

“I’ve spent countless hours helping my children find a missing soccer cleat or baseball glove—until I thought I had completely lost my mind, and decided to take things into my own hands,” says Ashley Macuga of Collected Interiors.

Her solution? “I headed to The Container Store with a list of sports by child in hand, and created a wall of Elfa baskets in our garage, each labeled with the child’s name and sport,” she explains. “Every time they came home from a sport, straight to the garage they went—putting back every item into their labeled bin. Every time the laundry was done, they learned to put their uniforms back into each individual basket.”

I have never in my life enthusiastically played a sport, but I get the principle behind Macuga’s process: one bin with a clear label that tells me it holds scarves and gloves, and another with a clear label that tells me it holds T-shirts, is both a storage method and a motivational tool to help those things stay in those places, instead of ending up on the floor because where it goes feels unclear.

Anything can be decor

Books, of course, have long been valued for their impact on a living room’s aesthetic, a fact which has in turn sparked—in my humble opinion—a silly amount of online discourse. Thinking about how your stuff looks, though, can be a key part of storing it. An example: never in my adult life have I had a linen closet in my home, and yet “things I would put in a linen closet” remains a category of items central to my life. Smith points out that a pretty set of sheets, neatly folded and placed on a shelf, give a bedroom a cozy, homey vibe. A clothing rack, either rolled or hung from a wall or even the ceiling, is both a place to store your clothes and a fun way to display favorite pieces.

Put your stuff inside other stuff

“In a house without closets every piece of furniture is fair game,” says Bethany Adams of Bethany Adams Interiors. Buying a new bed? Look for one with built-in storage, or tall enough to slide your own set of drawers underneath. An ottoman to put your feet up at the end of a long day? There’s no reason you shouldn’t go for one that doubles as a storage compartment for blankets, pillows, and overstock from your candle collection (this one might just be a me issue, actually). A piece like a sideboard in the living room can function as a home bar up top and a hub for wine glasses below, with the benefit of offering a way to store like with like, something Macuga says is key. “Be honest about how you live,” she says (did you expect this process to involve so much emphasis on radical honesty? I didn’t!) and where the activity you are trying to organize takes place.” Think about what you use and how you use it, and let those factors be instructive—towels can go on a shelf in the bathroom, but putting shampoo bottles in the kitchen is probably not going to work out in the long term.

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Related Reading:

How to Turn a Junk Room Into a Breakfast Nook

Dwell On This: How to Actually Organize Your Closet