I love hiking gear. I really do. I have a winter hiking gear set and a summer set, rucksacks, poles, crampons, electronic portable chargers, head torches, boots, another pair of boots, plenty of socks, sweat bands, trousers, tops, mid layers, base layers, more mid layers and rain jackets.
People tend to buy me vouchers for hiking and outdoor stores for birthdays and Christmas and I love that.
But while I have plenty of hiking gear, what I don’t have is plenty of storage.
I do ok. I’ve managed to free up a small wardrobe and I stick all my gear in there:
It does the job. But in the interests of full disclosure this photo is about a year old, I’ve got more gear in there, it’s messy now and I just feel like it doesn’t scale well. So I’ve been looking at clever storage ideas for my kit and here are some of my favourites.
1. More Wardrobe Space
So this person appears to have gone down the same route I did with simply using bog standard wardrobes.
But where I’ve just lazily popped a chest of drawers in, these have built in drawers and wire drawers. I’m confident you can do something similar with certain Ikea wardrobes. Though in reality if were to customise my own, I’d probably also go for sliding door wardrobes because that would enable me to get another one in opposite the existing one – doubling up on gear storage.
2. Hiking Pole Wall Storage
For hiking poles (and skis!) these wall mounted shelf options look really simple. And ideal for those of us who, to be honest, have three sets of hiking poles despite rarely ever using them.
3. Rustic Stacked Crates to Store Hiking Boots
I have so many of these crates and have never once thought to use them in this way. Need to do this.
Bonus points for the wine rack being used to house small accessories for hiking. Not only does it look great, but I now literally own more hiking gear than I’ll ever own wine.
4. Carabiners to Hang Hiking Bags
Why? Why have I never done this? You can see from my opening photo that my bags are just in the floor space in the wardrobe when in reality, this would be a great way to store bags of all sizes.
5. The Dedicated Room
Now this is impressive and I have gear storage envy. But erm, I don’t have a spare room to do this in. I have three children so unused rooms simply become gaming rooms or toy rooms or rooms in which they dump their stuff everywhere.
But I can dream, eh?