Not A Shed, Not A Cabinet: IKEA's Simple Outdoor Storage Solution Tackles Clutter

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Storing your outdoor items — furniture cushions, yard toys, decades of accumulated mosquito repellant doodads — in a little shed or a hard, plastic cabinet or deck box is perfectly fine until you need to move it around. Then, you remember how heavy they are, how readily they fall apart, and how challenging they can be to assemble. IKEA has your clutter needs covered with its soft-sided take on the deck box, the VATTERSO storage box. The basic model is cube-shaped and measures at about 2 ½ feet to a side, and there's a larger version that's about twice the size of the basic VATTERSO.

Like any other outdoor storage solution, these fabric boxes can protect your outdoor furniture cushions from damage and fading in the sun, which seems to be the reason most people buy them. The VATTERSO is waterproof, as you'd expect of outdoor storage, and holds more than meets the eye. At the time of writing, one reviewer even mentioned keeping an entire rolled-up patio rug in one. It's also more portable than its plastic or wooden cousins due to being lightweight and equipped with wheels and side handles.

The portable VATTERSO is the heavier brother of IKEA's waterproof TOSTERO storage box. The VATTERSO is more sturdily built and roughly the same volume, but is a little narrower and deeper than the TOSTERO. Both are made of polyester, a great material for outdoor furniture. But the TOSTERO series is mostly made up of furniture covers for outdoor items like grills. The fabric is significantly thinner, and it has handles but no wheels, limiting versatility. One place you might want to move the portable VATTERSO storage box is poolside.

There's always something to store by the pool, including poolside seat cushions, though IKEA does warn you to let items dry before storing them to minimize tasks like cleaning mildew off of outdoor cushions. And while you can seal the box with its zipper, it also comes with hook-and-loop tabs for quicker, ventilated storage, a potential benefit if you're likely to store things like snorkels or pool-cleaning gadgets that aren't easily dried. The VATTERSO allows you to keep a variety of outdoor items prone to dampness neatly tucked away, especially compared to plastic storage.

The VATTERSO's wheels can definitely be an asset in a perpetually rearranged space like a pool deck, though IKEA acknowledges that the VATTERSO is so light that it will sometimes move around a bit in the wind. But it's easy enough to give the box a semi-permanent, poolside parking space by using the webbing tab under its side handles, a strap that leads to a grommet you can use to help you screw the storage box to a deck. It might be a little difficult to drive a decking screw into the concrete around a swimming pool, but you could easily drive in a couple of concrete expansion anchors with integrated eye bolts, which you could then attach to the VATTERSO's grommets. You can pick up a four-pack of stainless steel expansion eye bolts for concrete from Amazon at $7.99.

But an outdoor screw will do the trick for a wooden deck that you might find around an above-ground pool. And if you've got the time to dress up your above-ground pool, why not take the extra step and keep it free of clutter as well?