Student storage ideas

Being a student is tough. You’ve got the endless essays and exams, of course, but on top of these is the pressure of living away from home for the first time. To make matters even harder, you’ve got to deal with not really ever having a permanent place to call home for longer than a semester or a year at a time. This is the hardest part of it all, really: how can you be expected to focus on the actual schoolwork with all the pressures of constantly moving around getting in the way?! 

Well, whilst we can’t help too much with the exam stress and how much you miss your mum, we can help you a little when it comes to setting up your home each time you move – and help you a little with the moving too!

In this article, we’ll provide you with some top student storage ideas that will help you manage your new home. Then we’ll give you some top moving tips and tips for storage during moving. These will help you minimise stress around the end of the semester, when you’re dealing with exams and moving all at once! 

Let’s dive right into some student storage ideas…

Your three biggest storage areas in your student digs will be your wardrobe, your desk, and under your bed. Here’s how to maximise their storage space:

Your closet is for more than just clothes

The wardrobe in your student room is the largest storage space you’ll get. Hang clothes like dresses and skirts, smart shirts and blazers, coats and jackets, and trousers. Use space saving clothes hangers to maximise room. Fold jeans, t-shirts, sweaters and sportswear. You can use boxes to organise your folded items on your closet shelves and floor. 

When all your clothes are in, hopefully you should still have some space! Then, you can store things like bedsheets and towels. These should ideally be folded and left on an easy to reach wardrobe shelf. However, if you’ve got no shelf space left, try a hanging organiser for your sheets and towels. You can also store bags and shoes in a hanging shoe organiser. 

Keep your workspace neat

This is probably the most helpful student storage idea we can offer. As a student, you’ll be spending as much time at your desk as you will out at parties. This means that keeping this area organised is vital. Here are some tips for organising and decluttering your workspace:

• If you have lots of loose papers, sort them into piles by topic and separate them with different colour binder clips, so you can always find what you need. 
• Use a shoebox with holes cut out for a charging station. This helps you manage all those messy wires. There are plenty of tutorials online – like this one – so you can make something like this yourself.  
• Use empty jars as pen and other stationery organisers. You can decorate these too! 
• Avoid using a million different notebooks so you don’t have to store all of them. Instead, use one notebook at a time that you can separate out into folders or papers by topic. You can also use pinboards to help organise your notes. 

Get under your bed 

The space under your bed is the final frontier for storage in your student room. If you’re lucky enough to have a double bed then you can fit just about anything underneath it! If you’ve only got a single bed, never fear though, you’ll be able to make it work. Buy yourself some under bed storage boxes for things like shoes or last semester’s lecture notes. You can also buy under-bed cotton bags to store things like out-of-season clothes and extra bedsheets.

Hopefully these student storage ideas will help you when you set up your new home! Now, here are some tips that will help you when you move in and out. 

1. Only take the essentials with you 

You don’t need too much storage space if you haven’t got much stuff. When you go to uni, it can be tempting to pack every single item you own. But fitting all that into student digs can be tricky, and it will only make moving around more difficult.

There is plenty of information out there about the essentials freshers will need to take with them when they fly the nest, like this article from The Telegraph. Some good advice is to only take what you can fit in one box and one bag per room. This means you’ll have a box and a bag each for kitchen items, bedroom items and bathroom items. This is quite strict, but if you can make it work for you then you’ll have the easiest move of all time! 

2. Get good at packing 

Packing up and moving your whole home every six months to a year can be really tough. But, if you nail a packing strategy, then moving gets a whole lot easier. 

There are plenty of resources out there to help you figure out how to pack in a way that works for you. Some people like to plan way in advance and start packing super early, whereas others prefer to declutter and then crunch all the moving into a couple of days. Figure out what works for you, and it will save you so much stress! 

3. Use self storage

The good news is, the moving part of it all can get a lot easier than you might imagine. If you utilise self storage in the town your university is in, you’ll only have to move your things into storage over the holidays, instead of moving it all back home, and then back to your digs when term starts again. If you’re lucky about the placement of your self-storage centre, you might even only have to move things a couple of streets over!

Using self storage can cut down a lot on the end-of-term stress, when you’re scrambling to hand in final assignments and move out all at once. Here at Currie Easy Self Storage, we’ve got the perfect student storage solution for you. Whether you just need to store a couple of suitcases or the entire contents of your uni room, we’ve got you covered. Get in touch today to discuss student storage for the upcoming holiday.