Q: What are your thoughts about having a storage room so that every other room is nice, but that room is trashed, with plans to go through the boxes at a later date? BTW the storage room will then be a craft room, and this is a 2 bed 950 sq. ft. apartment.
A: Oh, let’s just call the “storage room” what it its: the junk room. Listen, I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I don’t have a junk room, because I totally do. I think anyone who is lucky enough to have that extra space probably does. I’ve tried to avoid it, tried to tell myself it’s a bad thing, but when it comes right down to it, I’m kinda lazy, and it’s a bedroom no one’s using, and the door shuts, closing the mess behind it.
To mitigate the negative effects of the junk room, I do try to make sure I schedule time toward un-junking it regularly, although in an ideal world, I wouldn’t junk it up to begin with, but we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in the real one.
So the thing about your junk room is that you have a plan for it. It’s going to be a craft room. And that’s a great thing, and should be enough of an end game so that you might avoid the junk room entirely. Think about this: Instead of throwing random purchases and odds and ends and that one suitcase that’s a bitch to get in and out of storage into that room, what if you spent time setting it up as a craft room? Start getting your storage and furniture in order, and slowly but surely, transition it into the room you want it to be.
I’m not going to pretend that your extra room isn’t going to at least partly end up a junk room. But instead of making it a “someday” space (“It’s going to be a craft room”), how about making it that space now? Like, “It’s a craft room in progress.” Having that goal in mind just might help keep you from trashing the room in the meantime. I mean, you’re going to have to deal with the stuff you’re “storing” in there at some point. Why not do it once instead of letting it sit around and then having to do it at some point down the road?
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2 replies on “Ask UfYH: The Junk Room”
My mother is rock hard on this subject. She doesn’t want her storage space to be more cluttered because the storage space was to unclutter the house. It makes for tough decisions when you want to put something away.