Oh my goodness. We moved in to our new house five months ago and the home office-slash-study-slash craft room has been a disaster zone. That is until this week when I got in there and transformed the mess into a peaceful, organised office. Phew!

Here are some tips to create organised storage that you can use in your own home office:

1. First of all, take everything out and dust off your storage piece. You really can’t go past the classic office workhorse, the IKEA Expedit shelving unit in either 4 x 4 or 5 x 5 configuration.

2. Next, organise all your papers, office supplies, craft items, fabrics, cards and envelopes, emergency gifts, receipts, printer paper and toner, magazines and folders into categorised piles. Purge any unnecessary items. The trick now is to hide away all those essential items to create a neat, uniform look, and so that you can quickly and easily find what you need.

3. Take out all your potential storage containers and if you don’t have any, you may need to source some: folders, magazine files, CD storage boxes, concertina files, cardboard storage boxes and A4 storage boxes. Kikki.k makes some great, stylish storage containers. You can even use shoe boxes that you may have on-hand in the cupboard. Some tips:

• try to keep a limited colour palette (e.g. white and black with one colour)
• try to use identical containers in multiples if possible (e.g. same style and colour magazine files)
• you can cover shoe boxes with coloured paper to match your colour theme
• you can cover up shoe size information or logos on boxes with matching washi tape
• keep small office supplies such as paper clips, data sticks, post-it notes, staples etc in their own labelled small container inside a larger “Office Supplies” box.

4. Place all the empty storage containers in your shelving unit. Tips:

• You can create a nice sense of balance by placing the larger boxes at the bottom of the unit and small boxes at the top
• Identical containers look great positioned in a row
• Keeping magazine files together creates a uniform look
• If you have multi-coloured magazines, books or folders, group the colours together. You can also create a great rainbow effect by ordering like items by the colour spectrum.
• It can be tempting to cram all your office supplies into the unit. Your storage will look neater if you give each storage container some breathing space.
• Your storage unit will have cleaner lines without any items stored on top.

5. Once you are happy with the layout of your containers, label each container using a label maker, and fill them up.

6. Stand back and admire your handiwork and tweak if you need to.

Give your storage containers lots of “breathing space”.

Keep similar magazine files together and label their contents. Cover up logos and shoe box information with matching washi tape.

Place identical storage containers in a row lower down in the shelving unit. Order folders and other material by colour – a rainbow looks great.

Stack boxes from largest to smallest and stick to a simple colour palette.

Here is more office storage inspiration from other clever folks. I love the numbered magazine files which give this unit a strong graphic look. Note the simple colour palette (white and black) and that similar containers are kept together (magazine files lined up together, magazines stacked together). Label everything so that you can find it quickly and easily.

Good luck with your office storage organisation. I would love to hear your tips too.

Simplify your office storage with eBay

Try these searches:

• Ikea Expedit
• Kikki.K
• label maker
• washi tape
• A4 storage boxes