Best way organize your chests and storage for most houses

Do you find that across your 6 playthroughs you have at some point come down with a good routine of organizing your items? except when you find that you come back a year later you realize that you forgot where everything was kept? or maybe that you have a house that can technically store all your items but not neatly as its a hard task to come up with what should go where in order to best access everything neatly and efficiently?

well im here to tell you 2 things, 1 a great method of associating certain categories of items with the type of box it is in, and 2. best houses for gaming in skyrim

The number of chests doesnt matter

what is the first thing to consider is the number of chests in your house and the types of chests

some might think that the only simple way of organizing your items is to specifically get a house with that intention in mind

more specifically like you might think you need a "storage room" in lakeview manor or some house bigger with an array of 4 uniform storage boxes like Bloodchill cavern in order to keep everything tidy. but that is not the case

to use Lakeview manor/Bloodchill cavern as a high end of the spectrum, and the college of Winterhold's apprentice dorm at the low end of the spectrum, in terms of the sheer quantity of chests one being the most and the least. neither of these are better than the middle tier house options, such as Tundra homestead, and Breeze home,

the number of storage items only needs to range anywhere above 10 so you can choose the best chests, and the number that you use should only be from 5-7,

the main categories that you will separate your items by

if you cant comprehend the picture just pay attention to the first 5 hyphenated categories, and the dash after mentioning what you want to associate it with, that way its easier to remember for future reference

here are the categories
-trophies and armor sets used for collective purposes, dragon claws and dragon priest masks
-smithing bars straps materials used in all daedric, ebony, and dragonbone crafting and enchanting with soul gems,
-personal armory only uses YOUR weapons like the ones that specifically you use, any armors that are built to be overpowered that you or a follower can use at any given moment, weapons that you use for fun.
-sell all is obvious, anything that you looted with the sole intention of selling or simply getting rid of, this might even mean books
-alchemy ingredients and alchemy armor for restoration loop.
-potions however you like to separate them

my best recommendation when going for a memorable organization across playthroughs is that you associate the type of storage category with the type of storage container, but other than that, just stick to this algorithm done and done, most houses will have drawers, barrels, real chests, trophy table drawers, drawers with large shelves, and lockboxes/sachels, finally bookshelves and tall pantry shelf like drawers, the quality of the house has nothing to do with the ammount of containers, it is only based on the varaety of containers here


and as a small bonus, you should associate gems and jewels, or septims with other small/tiny storage like lock boxes etc. however i dont advise worrying about those things as far as storage goes

the reason this branching method works is because if you ever have any other things you need to store you can take a similar category and fill something right next to it,

for example if you have armory specifically for followers you can take up another barrel right next to your own armory barrel since having multiple barrels together are so common. and as i specified in the image, if you want disenchanting related items, that would go "secondary central" aka some place branching off of the central materials chest, and if you wanted a food chest, then that could branch off of usable potions, or literally mix, since they are meant to be in fridge/pantry shaped furniture anyways

these are houses (breezehome) (my favourite)

if you choose breezehome your center is going to be the main chest next to your bed, the bed being the important center, the chest in lydia's room is the trophy chest, the barrel under the stairs for personal armory and the drawer across from the fireplace bookshelf for books, and the big shelved drawer next to the table for selling things, and if you do alchemy then the alchemy stuff in the chest of the alchemy room. breezehome is my favourite as a base of operations for many reasons, being

+1 its the easiest to get house in the game, with no glitches involved, allowing for instant use of spouse store. the tundra homestead and bloodchill cavern has a fatal issue being that if you move a spouse into it, they will never start a store and they are part of an expansion and might get corrupted if you change your game up a bunch, also the solitude house costs a tremendous ammount.
+2 its super quick access to the house when you fast travel to it, (unlike markarth and college of winterhold archmage quarters and bloodchill cavern which you have to run for like 2 minutes to get to)
+3 being inside of whiterun provides arms length access to adrianne at the forge who and stocks more iron and stores more septims then most smiths, quick access to the drunken huntsman for thousands of iron arrows, belethor who is the best general goods merchant, arcadia's cauldron for early game restoration loop prep, fralia grey maine's shop which sells enchantable rings and necklaces at any time, and benefits for survival mode so you can use all these things and sleep without traveling far,
+3.5 and the lack of an enchanter is actually kind of good because if you go up to Farengar's arcane enchanter, it makes up for the run by actually having farengar right there so you can buy soul gems incase you needed them (plus it is free to use any time) and if you choose to not have the alchemy room you can do the exact same thing. to get to that
+4 it has tremendously good chest variety and perfect chest quantity and separation as described above "if you choose breezehome"^ riften house has a horrible selection of storage
+5 it becomes the local home of the best housecarl in the game and is good for using y'solda as a spouse that way she stays in the same city which she comes from meaning its impossible for sequences to break in her programming (aka you can also get the easiest spouse in the game as a package deal)
+5.5 if you care about the happiness of your family they will praise the house for being next to the market, this is something lakeview manor also excels at as they praise it for being near the lake with the awesome view.
+6 the small space and organization of the parts of the house make for the ability to use objects without having to travel to far between, (besides lack of a enchanting table) (this is something solitude and riften utterly fail in)
+7 as it is inside of whiterun walls you will never be attacked by bandits, wolves, giants, dragons, or be stopped from fast traveling because there is a stray mudcrab/slaughterfish within 50 feet of your house that spawns over and over again.
+8 you can freely swap the alchemy station to and from being a child room. something that lakeview manor fails at since you only get one chance to build a room.

-1 it is a small house so you might not want a full family, getting 2 children, 2 followers, 2 permanent summons, and a wife/husband can fill it up, however all of these things have super easy work-arounds such as not getting children, or moving them to another house, or not having 2 summons etc. and this is just speculation, not from real experience
-2 it doesnt have an outside farm convenient for growing wheat or bee stuff that tundra homestead and lakeview manor have, but you can still go to those places if you do want those ingredients.
-3 you have a cheap bed, and driftwood walls might not look shnazzy enough

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shnazzy

tundra homestead (awesome but glitched)

in tundra homestead there is a crucial smithing shack outside with every smithing thing you could need, and inside there is a compact house with a family room, a kitchen, a potions/enchanting room and a trophy room basement, perfect for separating your items all around a perfect house if not for the fact that you cannot have it be your first house or else your spouse will break and never start a shop, you need to get a vanilla house, move them in THAT and THEN move them into tundra homestead, this is the main reason i dont use it. other than that just put alchemy under the alchemy table, soul gems under the enchanter, and smithing stuff outside, put potions in the tall potion pantry next to the potion lab and put sell all behind the counter in the kitchen (in the big one), and obviously put any trophy or armor set freely in the trophy room, and for that house my personal armory chest was in the real chest left of the enchanter, next to the trap door, all around extremely organized and even has trophy mounts for separating dragon claws and dragon masks from the rest of everything, be careful though, the mask statues are broken. save before using them.

Lakeview manor or build your own (hearthfire) houses also (glitched)

if you choose lakeview manor you can get the armory room which is technically a great option but despite the perfect symmetrical organization of the room, that can be counter intuitive as this kind of house is the exact kind of house that i had that problem with, when every chest is the same, its hard to remember what goes where incase you stop playing for a while, and it points out the games weakness in not being able to label chests, nonetheless it has a perfect smithing area with everything you could ever need in one spot, an arcane enchanter upstairs where you can have a soul gem chest and a alchemy lab downstairs with a chest under the stairs for ingredients, and if you dont want the armory room your own bedroom upstairs also has all the storage you could ever need. leaving you free to choose any other extention, however remember that dragons and bandits will attack you and giants will constantly spawn inside the boundaries of your house while you are outside, meaning you will have to toggle noclip to go through your house and kill it, plus you will get attacked by dragons and mudcrabs will stop you from fast traveling.



the tower additions might be better for storage the the actual storage room.