How I Organize A Small House: My 5 Best Tips

As a member of the Wayfair Homemakers blogging team, I was given the opportunity to share a sponsored post with with a spring cleaning theme. One of the things I know the most about is how to organize a small house (because I live in one!)  I hope these organizing tips will help you get your own house spruced up this spring!

We live in a very small house, especially for having 5 children.  Though we would love to live somewhere with a little more space, we are content with what God has provided and we enjoy coming up with creative ways to organize a small house.  As crowded as it is, I think we have some great solutions that help to maximize our space.

Here are my 5 best tips for organizing a small house:

1.Use the space under the bed.

There is a lot of space under the bed, so it's a great place to store things.  Some ideas for things you can store under the bed are:

• Shoes
• Kids' toys
• Gift wrapping supplies
• Exercise equipment (weights, steps, etc.)
• Suitcases (bonus – you can store other things INSIDE the suitcases too!)
• Out-of-season clothing

2. Use the walls.

You can find a lot of storage and organization space on your walls!  All you need is some strategically placed cabinets.  Using the space on your walls frees up floor space and keeps your small home from feeling so crowded.

Our homeschool room has a vintage feel to it, and I would LOVE this cabinet in there!

3. Use baskets and bins.

One of the simplest tips I have learned is to use baskets and bins a lot!  It gives you a place for all of those “I need to keep this around, but I don't have a good place to put it” items where they won't be sitting and causing an eyesore.

I use baskets or bins for:

• Random game pieces that I know we'll need later
• Kids' papers that I have to keep long enough for them to forget about before I can get rid of them. 🙂
• Random pieces or parts that I know go to something, but I don't want to throw away because I know I will end up needing it as soon as I throw it away
• Kids' school papers that I need to grade or correct
• And SO MUCH MORE

4. Use stackable storage.

If you can stack things, you are multiplying how much you can fit into a space.  Now, the BEST way to keep a small house organized is to minimize how much you are trying to fit into it in the first place.  Declutter, declutter, declutter.  And then declutter some more!  BUT…there are still things that we all need to keep, and we have to have a place to put them.  Stack it up, and you'll be able to fit more in your space!

5. Sometimes bigger is better.

In our kitchen we used to have a small baker's rack where we kept the microwave and some dishes and what-not.  Then my amazing husband custom built me a HUGE cabinet that filled the entire wall.  I was fearful that it would make the kitchen feel smaller having that large piece of furniture in there, but I was wrong!  Having a floor-to-ceiling piece of furniture made the room feel BIGGER, and of course the big bonus was that I had TONS more storage space too!

We ended up doing the same thing in the bathroom, and even though the room is tiny, the large piece of furniture actually makes the room feel bigger and gives me so much more space to store all of our toiletries and towels.

(The bathroom is so small that I had to go into the hallway to back up far enough to take a picture of the cabinet!)

This cabinet has been the best thing!  Mom, dad, and the kids have their separate bins with their toiletries and “hair fixing stuff”.  The middle section holds our rolled up towels (when they're clean – ha!) The bottom left cabinet holds the laundry hamper, and the bottom right holds the trash can.  It just keeps everything looking so neat and streamlined instead of a chaotic hodge-podge of random articles everywhere.

If you don't have a handy-man husband, or if you'd just rather do things the easy way :), Wayfair has a large selection of cabinets and chests.  You should be able to find something there that meets your needs.

If you need more inspiration for organizing a small house, I've created an idea board on Wayfair with all kinds of smart storage solutions that will help maximize the space in your small house.

It is possible to organize a small house!  You just need to make sure you reduce what you have to the bare minimum and take advantage of all of the spaces that often go unused.