Real Solutions from Real Homes: Brilliant Ways to Make Room for Your Trickiest to Store Items

Outdoorsy types have their own unique organizing struggles. You see, bikes and surfboards and other sporting equipment are big. And they’re really hard to store neatly at home–especially without a garage or a mudroom or even more than a few hundred square feet to work with.

These house tours, though, managed to make it work, finding tight and tidy spaces where they could store some big equipment at home.

In Carlos & Laura’s Stunning Spanish Home, they store their bikes right in the entryway on wall-mounted hooks. The color and pattern in the room help distract from the bikes.

In Audrey’s Cozy Industrial Soho Apartment, she keeps a surfboard right in the entryway, too. Because it actually coordinates with the room, the surfboard here is storage and a cool decor accessory.

The same goes for the bicycle in Audrey‘s living room. It’s propped up on a pedestal, so to speak, and becomes art for the room.

If you’d rather not put your gear on display, you might still have some space for it above the furniture in a lesser-trafficked room, like the kids’ scooter above the closet storage in Giovan & Chloe’s Urban Vintage Loft.

Or just leave it all out in the open. In Jevon’s Transformed Condo in Arizona, a pair of bikes and a handful of other equipment take up residence in a corner of the main living area, neatly organized to add to the decor of the space.

And finally, in Rachel & Brian’s Spacious Place in Chicago, they looked up for a neat place to stash a bike: Onto a pulley system mounted to the ceiling in their entryway.