How to choose the right basket to order and organize your home

You are in your living room and you look carefully at the chaos in which you are immersed. Children’s toys, dog toys, the table transformed into a mini office where you telecommute and do your homework, blankets thrown here, magazines scattered there. When did chaos erupt? You think, if it was only yesterday when we cleaned up.

So that this scene does not repeat itself -or repeats itself much less-, the essential thing is to have allies of order in the house. We are not talking about servants, yes, but about containers and organization baskets.

“You have to get out of your head that tidy people tidy up all day,” said Antonia del Río, an environmental designer who specializes in organizing spaces. For her it’s the opposite. : if we have a day-to-day ordering and organization system, you have more time to do other things and not keep ordering.

O-Three , his entrepreneurial spirit, means order, organization and optimization, the three pillars on which he relies to achieve successful results. Through it, she offers courses, workshops, advice and organizing products. On your Instagram account @o_tres you can find optimization tips and all kinds of news about this discipline.

Storage boxes or baskets are the best help in keeping spaces tidy, but before you start buying them in bulk, you need to grab your tape measure and calculate how much space you have available and how you might fit these containers.

“If you have 50 cm, your objective, more than to find the prettiest basket, is to find the one that helps you to optimize the space as well as possible”, he explains. Therefore, we should always measure before buying.

Do all materials work? This varies depending on the function and the space in the house the container would go in. For example, “if you put cardboard boxes in the bathroom, even if they don’t receive direct water, they could eventually get wet, generate fungus and rot,” Antonia explains.

“For this space, an acrylic, plastic or wire container would be much better. But there is also fabric, wicker, felt or cardboard,” says Antonia. In addition, there are products targeted specifically for each area of ​​the house: there are some for the closet, the kitchen, the pantry or the bathroom itself.

“For warehouses, for example, I prefer plastic containers with lids, because there we need to stack them to optimize space,” he analyzes. However, if you need to store your clothes, cardboard boxes can also come in handy. “The weight is much lower and there is no liquid factor to spoil them,” he says.

“If we’re going to be using the container with oils, bottles, or things that get stained, it’s best to go with acrylic because it’s a tough material that I can easily move around and clean from time to time,” says the founder of O -Very. For the refrigerator, at least, it is recommended that it be made entirely of acrylic.

“Sometimes we end up buying more when it breaks, so it’s better to suddenly detect the material most compatible with the space of the house, to make the purchase only once”, he specifies. .

This point entirely depends on your need. “When we organize clothes, the container does not have to be transparent, because with a label on the outside, we can categorize what is inside. There are very good ones that are made of cardboard covered with fabric”, specifies the expert in the order.

One material that can be compatible with wardrobes and closets is cellulose, which, since it’s not that stiff, can be a good option for accommodating different types of clothing.

In the case of Antonia del Río, she has several transparent boxes in a cupboard in the living room, because she needed to store and stack toys. So your daughter can easily recognize where her toys are just by looking at the cabinet. In turn, he has other larger toys in gray containers with lids. “She already knows by heart where the toys are: when she needs something in these containers, she just lifts the lid,” she says.

He also owns a piece of furniture that he defines as a “floor shelf”, whose spaces he has completed with textile organizers, without a lid, but with a handle, so that they can slide out like a kind of drawer. “They don’t need a lid because they’re not stacked or visible to the naked eye,” he adds.

Baskets, says Antonia, are a little easier to handle, since you’re containing and not hiding. “It’s more free: we can put blankets, cushions or whatever is needed at the moment. As it is visible, the main objective is for the basket to look good,” he says. Among the most common materials on the market are wicker, jute, felt and wire. Just as in the living room you can contain shelters or comfort objects, in other rooms you can put toys or other things that have a larger volume and that you need to contain. In case you want to hide, the basket should have a lid.

In a past article, Veronica Orb, Certified Order Consultant with the Method KonMari , explains that disorder occurs for three reasons: an excess of things, poor organization or a mixture of the two previous ones. “To reverse it, there are also three steps: discover, define and design”, and although this has been explained to organize the closet, it is something that we can apply to any space in the house. .

In the discovery phase, you can analyze which things are on top or scattered on the floor, to see if they should be organized in boxes or contained in baskets. If in this same process you encounter objects that no longer make sense for them to be in this place, you can assign them to another space in the house or do without them through donations or sales, if they are in good condition, or disposing of it in case it breaks, hoping to recycle it if you can.

With Antonia del Río’s selection tips, we took a spin on Pinterest. In the following list you can find different corners and spaces in which baskets have been chosen to optimize space in different spaces.

The way The daily mail posted on his Pinterest account that hundreds of buyers rushed to get wire baskets because they are the “perfect storage solution” for multi-family homes. Baskets can be used in many rooms of the house, although in the bathroom they work quite well.

Popular Pinterest Content Creator Krystal Schlegel broadcast on their networks a series of tips on how to organize pantries, fridges and containers so everything stays in its place.

Sophia Lee, a very successful content creator on organization and interior design, places great importance on baskets to keep spaces order and stylish. In this case, in an article about decorating apartments for university students Advise them to put away throw pillows in the living room.

Baskets can also be used in spaces where there are no drawers or furniture to store things. A half-height bookcase or a shelf opened they can become a beautiful chest of drawers, as suggested this post from Organizing Moms which also includes simple instructions on how to hide your TV or game console cords in a basket.

The following proposal is part of the article “16 clever ideas for managing bedroom clutter”, suggested by the site Better homes and gardens . If you can’t stand seeing your clothes lying around in the morning—or those of your spouse or children—a basket next to the bed is a great solution. In addition to giving a rustic and warmer touch to the space, it will immediately bring order to the rooms.

*Prices for products in this item are current as of October 21, 2022. Values ​​and availability may change.