Re: Summer 2015 | Page 94

A place for everything and everything has a place There is no doubt, our lives are increasingly more stressful. We pack in so much into our working week, and then like to play hard at weekends to make the most of the short reprieve before returning to work. Throw in a wedding into the mix and it’s a whole different level of stress! However, once you’re back from the honeymoon, and the adrenaline from the most important event of your lives has dissipated, it’s time to get your house back in order, back to normality and put away all those wedding gifts. Being organised is key to making everything work seamlessly. Our homes as well as our work spaces need to be clear and uncluttered, so our minds can focus on what is needed. One of the biggest expenses in our lifetime, aside from weddings, is our home. Putting aside the mortgage and general everyday bills, the home is where we spend most of our wages. There has been much coverage in the press over the past few years on the costs of moving house. “Improve – don’t move” has been many people’s motto and rather than incurring all the moving costs such as removal company and stamp duty, spending time on upgrading your current home and making 92 improvements is seen as more beneficial and will increase the value of your home when you do eventually decide to move. Many homeowners, with growing families, will bemoan the lack of space as the home fills with more ‘things’. Many people work from home nowadays and this will also take up space with office furniture and shelving for office equipment and paperwork. Starting off with the bedroom, hinge wardrobes inevitably take up more room than a sliding door option. Add to this mirrored sliding doors and this creates the feeling of more space in what could be a fairly small area. If the insides of the wardrobes have all the necessary storage solutions, again, the space can be optimised to put away as much of your ‘stuff’ as possible. Nobody wants to go to bed after a hard day at work in a room full of clutter. Tidy room tidy mind! Offices are taking over areas of our homes, as many of us spend more time trying to achieve a good work / life balance. With children at home, this can inevitably create added stress with important paperwork and expensive office equipment at the peril of small people! Being able to hide this away and create clean, tidy working space that is hidden from others is the perfect solution to helping you with that work / life balance. Being able to shut away our daily cluttered life at a moment’s notice is possible if organised in the correct manner. How many times has an unexpected guest turned up when the house is a tip? Being able to hide everything away quickly is ideal and helps to take the stress out of theses occasions. Over the years the home storage solutions market has created some innovative and frankly fantastic solutions to help us all in our homes. Whether you’re wanting to tidy up your current home and have a place for everything, or if you’re looking to sell your house, one of the biggest pitfalls for potential buyers is lack of storage space, particularly for families. Investing a little bit of time and money in creating storage space in those tricky spaces can make the difference between a sale or not. Below are some examples of areas where a little bit of storage solutions can help: • Bespoke drawers under your staircase  to make use of that sometimes cluttered and ‘lost’ space are a fantastic way to store shoes, coats, bags etc. • Large sliding doors throughout the  length of a hallway can hide all the cleaning equipment, scooters and kids’ school paraphernalia. • A section of a room dedicated to office  space, hidden behind a seamless sliding door. • Spare pull down bed, hidden behind a  wardrobe sliding door. This can create a spare bedroom instantly. B  y Greg Bradley Gapsol utions.co.uk