insideKENT Magazine Issue 46 - January 2016 | Page 114

INTERIORS AN organised NEW YEAR cont. Labelling is a great idea for food too. Create boxes (reusable plastic storage containers are a good example as you can get lots of different sizes and shapes) for your fridge that are labelled ‘eat first’, ‘packed lunches’, or even labels with the use-by date on them. Removable fridge and freezer labels from Lakeland called Freezeasy Labels mean you can change your message as often as you want (www.lakeland.co.uk/p2805/Freezeasy-Labels). Coats & Shoes Coats and shoes are perhaps the most irritating of messes in a home. They come off as soon as we get in the door, so it’s the entryway that becomes full of outdoor gear, making it the first thing that visitors see (and the first thing you see when you get in, which can put a dampener on even the best moods). A coat rack (if there is space) or pegs for the wall can make all the difference – no more coats left on bannisters or flung over chairs. As for shoes, a shoe tidy that can sit neatly in the hallway and not get in anyone’s way is ideal. If it can tuck under another piece of furniture or be placed in a cupboard then all the better. Keep Your Drawers Neat Desk drawers, that is. Because drawers are, by their very nature, meant to keep things hidden (or at least stored safely), and therefore the contents generally can’t be seen, it’s easy to just throw things in and be done with it. The problem comes when you need to find something, and you don’t know which drawer it’s in because everything was filed in a fairly random way. So, take everything out and throw away the rubbish. Then see what you’ve got left. Work out how to categorise your drawers so that you know precisely what goes where and, if you can, partition the drawers to keep everything that much neater. Go Wireless Okay, you can’t go completely wireless – not yet, anyway – but those wires and power cords that are left hanging around need to be untangled, sorted, and tidied up. Not only will this look more pleasing to the eye, but it will also mean you’ll have an easier time of it when it comes to removing any of the wires as you need to. There are some great tools on the market to help you with this, and they are well worth purchasing (for some reason, no matter how many times those 114 wires get unplugged, untangled, and plug in again they still end up in a mess, much like the Christmas lights). They include the good -ooking and utterly usable cable tidy from Maplin (www.maplin.co.uk/p/cable-zip-tidy-black-rs62s). Nesting Nesting is a wonderful way to keep things neat – it simply means that smaller items can be stored inside larger ones, and there is no better example of that than saucepans. Saucepans are bulky and much used, and this combination means that they get shoved into a cupboard any which way because a) they’re awkward to store neatly and b) it’s okay, you’ll be using them again tomorrow. But it’s not okay. It’s not okay because sooner or later they will become a bigger problem, with the pots spilling out when the cupboard door is open (and damaging the floor, themselves, your foot, your head…) or getting in the way of anything else being able to be stored there. So keep the saucepans (and frying pans, they can sit at the bottom) in a nest formation and you’ll free up plenty of cupboard space and it will all look so much neater. As for the lids, they can be kept in a drawer (neatly), or a rack kept on the kitchen counter or a cupboard.