Domestic Standardisation and Uniform Multitaskers

I wrote a little while ago about our super-simple toy storage revamp, involving a set of identical Ikea baskets. I also wrote about liking to buy standardised industrial solutions. Now I’m going to write about how domestic standardisation in all sorts of spheres is improving our lives.

Life changes. You move house. Your children grow. You get new hobbies and drop old ones. And your domestic environment needs to change with you. It would be ridiculous to throw away all your current storage solutions and buy new ones just because you’re in a slightly different stage of life – but really, some of the super duper whizz bang Pinterest storage solutions mean you’ll be doing exactly that every other year, because they are so perfectly fitted to the snapshot of their current contents.

Your Lego might fit perfectly into colour coded boxes that are exactly the right size… but… what about when you buy the next set of Lego? Where is that going to go? And what are you going to do with all the boxes when it’s no longer Lego but skateboarding instead?

I am slowly developing my non-system of home organisation and storage, and have come to believe that it is better to buy a generic product that does the job at hand adequately than to buy a specific product that can only do one job perfectly.

We have a number of storage solutions deployed in our home:

Ikea Gabbig boxes, currently storing: toys, blankets, knitting projects, clothes…

White rectangular airtight lidded boxes, currently storing: many kinds of flour, many kinds of rice, oats…

Mini binder clips (MUCH more useful than clothes pegs!), currently clipping: the ends of our toothpaste tubes, various sheafs of paper, the tops of numerous food packets, hanging paper off nails in the wall…

Empty tall, thin olive jars from Aldi, currently holding: numerous spices, used batteries to take to the recycling point, small sewing items…

And I am just about to introduce two more:

The boxes that reams of paper come in (I have a friend who will bring me empty ones from his office), to store: mostly outgrown children’s clothing, but hopefully also some of my sewing supplies and some gardening stuff. I can also us the lids separately as trays (e.g. for incoming and outgoing documents, or to corral jars or pouches). I was briefly tempted to cut some down to make half-height ones, but I think that would overly complicate the available options without much increase in utility as I can stack the lids by themselves well enough for my purposes.

A4 zippered mesh pouches, to store: wooden puzzles we got for Christmas, paperwork, a frequently-used-tools sewing kit. (I may get some smaller A6 ones in the future for pencil cases, dice, card games, dominoes, etc.)

At any point in the future, these items are going to be sufficiently generic that we can always get more. We might not be able to buy the exact fancycopper mini binder clips that we have now, but mini binder clips per se are not going to go out of style any time soon. A4 is such a standard size that we will always be able to get more pouches the same size, even if the colours don’t match. Someone will always make baskets to Ikea’s standard dimensions, even if they’re a slightly different design.

The systems are infinitely expandable according to our future needs. But they are also few enough in number that I don’t need to wrack my brains to figure out which one of a zillion different options to use for something and if we might have one free at the moment. It takes all of a minute to run through the options in my head, choose, and see if there’s one that’s not being used. I think it’s much easier to handle lots of the same thing than lots of different things.

I’m also not storing lots of redundant unitaskers. Mini binder clips have a much wider range of utility than paperclips, so I use them for holding paperwork together. A single large container of binder clips to do a large number of jobs, rather than a lot of little containers of various stationery items.

It is not the absolute most efficient system at any given moment. For example, there will be things that don’t take up all the space of one particular container. There will be places that the containers don’t fit in perfectly to the available storage space.

That’s OK.

I believe that this kind of domestic standardisation is the most efficient long-term use of your space, time and money. You won’t be rebuying to replace items – just to expand if necessary. Multiple containers will tessellate well with each other. They tend to be cheap because they are functional and sturdy because they are often aimed at commercial users.

I only had my eureka moment a little while ago, hence why I am still adding systems. I need to store wooden puzzles and none of my existing systems would do a good job of keeping the pieces and board together. It took me a matter of moments to realise that, as I have so few systems “on the go”. I also need a container with a lid that is not as expensive or hard to open as the airtight food pails.

I genuinely feel, though, that I am approaching peak system. (There’s me being optimistic!) There are few categories of item that would not somehow work with these systems.

I am looking for a good first aid storage system, and I think that an airtight food pail coupled with some A6 zipper pouches for internal organisation would work just fine.

I also want a better way to store cutlery than our current over-stuffed and hard-for-toddler-to-use canteen – although I’m struggling to figure out how our current systems would work for that. Olive jars standing up in a box, maybe?? I’ll get back to you on that one!

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on your own domestic systems. I know that in America, canning jars are very cheap and used for a huge variety of purposes. This is one instance when you should check Pinterest! You’ll see above that two of mine are completely free: olive jars and paper boxes. There are a number of other sources of free storage systems: the packing of any foodstuff you buy regularly enough to build up a stash or leftover containers from your workplace, for example. Or very cheap items, such as ordinary envelopes.

My criteria for a good system are:
– Ease of availability for future purchasing (standard size, not likely to be discontinued)
– Square or rectangular shape to stack and tessellate well
– Easy to label/see inside – and easy to RElabel when it’s repurposed
– Easy to store when empty (e.g. stack inside each other)
– Visually neutral (no zany colours or patterns) so they can go in any room in the house

I don’t label our baskets because you can just look in the top. I label the airtight pails with a chinagraph pencil – write on, rub off. (I also write things like rice:water ratios on them as aides memoire.) Binder clips don’t need labels and can actually attach bit of paper to label other containers! You can see inside the olive jars, although I do label some with either masking tape or paper with a bit of sellotape over. (Frustratingly, the chinagraph pencil doesn’t work well on them. But bought sticky labels are less universally useful than ordinary scrap paper and sellotape.) I will label the boxes with paper, Sharpie and sellotape. And the zippered pouches don’t need labels.

I’m also thinking about similar “lots of the same thing, not lots of different things” approaches to other parts of our life. For example, we already (try to) do it with children’s clothes: pick one style of top and buy it in multiple colours. Ditto trousers, socks, etc… When we come to homeschool, I’m hoping to have lots of multitaskers (e.g. packs of cards, lego, generic notebooks and paper, zippered pouches!) rather than lots of specific “activity kits” or “curriculum kits”.

I don’t think it’s joyless. I think it makes mental and physical space for the stuff that should bring you real joy.

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Update: I thought of another example of domestic standardisation! We only have two kind of tupperware (actually from Lock&Lock) – a deep one and a shallow one. They both take the same size lid and differ only in depth. Sure, sometimes we have had to put something small in a too-big tupperware or split something over two larger tupperwares but we NEVER have to match up lids EVER.

Also, there are plenty of examples of non-standardised storage solutions in our house. We have a tall round tin for spare toothpaste and toothbrushes that used to contain biscuits. We keep emergency ibuprofen and paracetamol in our kitchen in a plastic tray that we once bought plums in. We keep our mini binder clips in the lid of an old fudge box.

The common denominator here is that they were whatever free oddment I happened to lay my hands on at the time. I didn’t buy them. I have stopped storing them on spec. I just have a rummage through the recycling bin and see what I can see. I am happy to use such containers for odd tasks – I just only do it in an existing system doesn’t work or isn’t available, and I have entirely stopped actually purchasing unitaskers. When these non-standardised containers are no longer useful, they simply go back in the recycling and disappear. They don’t then create their own storage problem which needs to be solved!

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Another update on 13th June 2021:

We didn’t manage to get the printer paper boxes in the end, so I bought a pack of archive/bankers boxes with packaging damage for cheaps. They’re great. Right now they’re mostly holding old children’s clothes by size, and we have a few unassembled ones for the next sizes, but I plan to use them for homeschool records in the future. One box per school year, then a ringbinder or zippered pouch per child inside it. I might even use them for current clothes storage at some point, as we could take the trundle bed out from under our single bed and have it separately in the room then use the boxes as “drawers” under the upper bed. Right now Awdry sleeps in the pulled-out bottom of the Ikea Slakt clipped to the upper bed and has one drawer for clothes and one drawer for bed linen. When Geronima moves into a bed, we’ll put Awdry in the upper one and Geronima in the lower one but might not want them attached together.

We’ve had a little storage shuffle recently, and I wanted to show you a new use for those Ikea Gabbig baskets: a bedside table!

While I’m pregnant I need some stuff on “my” side of the bed, and this was just perfect. Yes, that’s a lot of medicine in there! Plastic supermarket fruit tray and paper prescription bags as utterly Pinterest-worthy dividers. I like my bedside basket so much that I think I’ll keep it after the baby’s here. No extra purchases required, immediately repurposable once it ceases to be useful for this particular purpose.