Tips for Organizing Your First Apartment

An apartment offers freedom for creation; there are more rooms to decorate and to personalize. It is easy to take advantage of the sudden increase in space that comes with an apartment; however, it is important to keep organized.
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Moving from a dorm room to an apartment is a large project. When you live in the dorms, your space is usually very limited, you share a bathroom with numerous other students and you cannot put nails in or paint your walls.

An apartment offers freedom for creation; there are more rooms to decorate and to personalize. It is easy to take advantage of the sudden increase in space that comes with an apartment; however, it is important to keep organized.

Here are some organizational tools my roommate and I came up with that we have found very useful.

The Living Room

Your living room will be your main guest entertaining area, so organization is important in keeping things tidy.

My roommate and I hang our keys on hooks by our front door; this way we are sure to know where they are at all times.

We keep our mail divided in a desk organizer by the door as well. Living in an apartment means starting to keep track of bills, and this keeps our bills and important documents in one place.

To keep postcards and other important cards in one spot, we hung up a piece of twine between two pictures hanging on our wall. Not only is this useful, but it also adds a decorative element to our living room.

The Kitchen

Now that you have your own kitchen, you will want to keep it organized and user-friendly.

We use small kitchen shelves to organize our bowls and plates, and a desk organizer (seen on the top shelf in the picture) to organize our Tupperware lids.

If you are not looking to buy any containers, use what you have. We keep some of our cooking utensils in an empty metal can.

In terms of other storage spaces, we utilize numerous metal shelving units such as these.

The Bathroom

One of the best things about moving into an apartment is no longer sharing a bathroom with countless people.

Because bathrooms can be pretty small in apartments, a shower curtain such as this has proved very helpful to us. We can keep our shower items in the mesh pockets, which frees up more space around the tub.

Closet Space

For closets, hanging shoe organizers come in handy for storage. You can store items like household cleaners in these.

Your bedroom

Even if you are still sharing a bedroom in your new place, it is easy to organize your room using plastic containers or cardboard boxes. I keep my school supplies in a container under my bed.

You may already have one of these from your dorm room, but if not, look into this closet space saver. I bought mine at Wal-Mart. I keep hats, shoes and swimwear in my closet organizer; this frees up my closet shelf and drawer space.

Command hooks will still be your friend in an apartment. I use a few to hang up book-bags and kitchen oven mitts, but the people at Command have come up with a list of more ideas for these hooks.

For more ideas about organizing your apartment, check out Pinterest; you will find a lot of cool organizational ideas as well as DIY projects on this site.

Happy organizing!

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