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~~Sell what you can~~
A few years ago we moved from a 14 room house where we often had guests, to a two bedroom, one bath home which fortunately had a den. Our first approach was to have a month-long garage sale before the move. We threw away or gave away anything we could. Never-the-less, we had great linens, tableware and bedding that we did not want to part with. We love books and puzzles. We also had acquired many wonderful decorative gifts from guests and friend over the years which we preferred not to part with. In short we had a storage nightmare. Let me tell you how we worked it out.

~~Box, Label and Store~~
During our move we boxed everything and labeled carefully. We made sure to get moderately sized uniform boxes that would stack well. We marked them on every side to make sure we could see what was in them. Sometimes this is the best that you can do until you have found or created adequate space.

~~Use the space you have~~
Once in our new home we unpacked the essentials first. We unpacked enough linen to fill the linen cabinet and the rest we left in boxes. We unpacked only the essential kitchen item, but found that we still had no pantry space. We arranged the furniture as we wanted it and then had another garage sale to sell the remaining pieces we did not need. We called a thrift store to take away what was not sold, and rented a small storage space for 2 months while we created storage solutions for the rest of our boxes.

~~Build an inexpensive pantry~~
Our first project was the pantry. We had an empty 26" wall space in the kitchen. We bought 4 eight foot 1x6 pine boards and asked the lumber store to cut two of them into 2 foot sections. We also bought nails to put the boards together and six angle irons to attach the pantry to the wall. The two long boards became the uprights for each side and we spaced the shelves at 10 inches each. This is a good size to accommodate the height of two stacked 15 oz vegetable cans or a gallon jar. Once the shelf is fastened to the wall securely it can hold 200 cans of food stored just 2 cans deep so you can see just about everything. We draped the pantry with a curtain that matched those in the dinning area on rods that could swing out for better access.

~~Above the Windows~~
The next thing we tackled was the space above the windows. Most rooms have an area above the level of the windows that can be used to display decorative items. We used eight inch pine boards for this, stained to match the rest of the woodwork.

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