Storing Items under Your Bed

Our bedrooms are supposed to be a refuge from the outside world; a place where we can retreat from our cares and worries and recharge our batteries. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to turn what are supposed to be our retreats from the world into storage rooms.

Why not take some steps to be able to reclaim your sanctuary? While it is true that every room can use some storage, it is not necessary to turn over your entire room to that need. Typically, there is one area of the bedroom that is not only perfect for storage, it is also out of most everyone's sight and quite often overlooked. The single most often overlooked area in bedroom storage is, believe it or not, the bed—or, more accurately, under the bed.

• Boxes. If you are looking to store items that you are not going to need access to for a while (about once or twice a month at most) then boxes are the way to go. Boxes can be one of the more commonly used and acquired forms of storage. Simply go to your local store and ask the manager if there are any narrow boxes that you can have. Typically they are going to say that you need to come back later on in the evening and pick them up. Then put the items that you want stored into the boxes, seal the boxes, and simply slide them under your bed.
• Drawers. There are times when you are going to need something a little more substantial than cardboard boxes. You can purchase prefabricated plastic drawers that are easily installed under a person's bed. These drawers are perfect for storing items that you are going to need to access more often then simply once or twice a month.
• Chest. Chests are similar to drawers, in that they are prefabricated out of plastic or some other durable material. However, there is a slight difference in that storage chests usually have some kind of wheels that enable pulling the chests completely out from under the bed a lot easier than you can with the boxes or drawers. These chests are perfect for those items that are going to be larger than a pair of pants or some other kind of clothing. Some of the items that you can store in here are things like board games, art work, or blankets.
• Built-in drawers. When you find yourself faced with a serious lack of storage, try using a bed frame that has built-in drawers. Typically, these types of drawers are going to be more expensive than any other storage system that you might use in your room simply because they are actually a part of the bed frame. And, as you know, that can be a little expensive.