[caption id="attachment_2647" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Organizing Your Self Storage Units[/caption] Summer has come to an end, the kids are back in school, and you realize that it’s time to pack the boogie boards, snorkels, and shorts into your Alhambra storage units. It’s also time to bring out the winter clothing, holiday decorations, and snowboards. Many of our customers spend this time of year going through their storage units reorganizing by placing the items they don’t need into storage, and by pulling out things like the plastic pumpkins and Christmas trees. For this week, we’ve put together a few ideas and tips for how best to organize your storage units. Color Coding With Tape – Tip #1 Here at US Storage Centers, one of our favorite tips for organizing your storage unit is to label your boxes with color coded tape or stickers. For example, you only need your Christmas items for a few weeks a year (unless you’re the enthusiastic type who decorates in July). If you label all of your Christmas boxes with a strip of red tape or red stickers, then those items are easy to spot in your storage unit. For Halloween, you can use orange tape, summer items could be green, and boxes full of winter gear could be labeled with blue tape. Be sure to label your boxes on all four sides because you never know which way they’ll get turned around when moving. Sometimes we see people who put labels on top of their boxes. They later realize, as they begin to stack their boxes, that they’re covering their labels. Make sure the labels are on the sides of the boxes. You also can color code your boxes by family members. For instance, keep your sons items in specific color coded boxes, and do the same for your daughter, your spouse, and even your dog, Waldo. Another color code organizing tip would be to do so by the rooms within your home. Just make a list of the rooms in your home, everything from the master bedroom to the patio, and pick a color for these rooms and place that sticker or tape on all four sides of the box. Once you have done this, when you’re moving into your new place, you can place a corresponding piece of paper in that color on the door of the room where the box goes. If you have a blue sticker on all your boxes with kitchen items, then you’ll place a blue sheet of paper on the door way or wall of the Kitchen. If you have a little extra money in your moving budget, then we recommend purchasing plastic storage bins or totes. These are fantastic for storage units, because they often come in a variety of colors, this eliminates the need to use color coded tape or stickers. An additional benefit to using these plastic storage boxes is they’re more durable than cardboard and they’re waterproof. Just think of what could happen if you’re moving on a rainy day—you don’t want to pack a truck full of soggy cardboard that will damage your items. The storage containers are also uniform in size and shape which allows you to stack items as high as you can reach. Boxes that are different sizes are more difficult to stack because they don’t fit together well and you end up losing valuable space because of your limited stacking height. Please check back on Wednesday for another of our favorite storage unit organizing tips.
