Organising a small home in Saigon

Most organising advice was written for houses with a garage, a basement and a dry loft. A Saigon apartment has none of those, plus eighty per cent humidity for half the year and a balcony where nothing survives the rain. This is the version for here: what to keep where, what to rotate, and where the overflow goes.

Updated September 2026

Why the usual advice fails here

A house in a temperate suburb has three or four kinds of space: living rooms, cupboards, and the cold dry rooms nobody lives in, where suitcases, decorations, tools and boxes wait. Organising there means moving things from the first kind to the third. A Saigon apartment has only the first two, and the second is small. The typical two-bedroom flat has one wardrobe per bedroom, a shoe cabinet, kitchen cupboards and perhaps a storage bench, and the climate takes some of that back: a wardrobe against an outside wall grows mould on leather in a wet July, a cupboard under the sink is damp all year, and a box on the balcony is a box outdoors. So the organising problem here is not where to put things; it is choosing which things get to be in the flat at all, and giving the rest a home that is not the flat.

The zones

Humidity, the organising rule people miss

Saigon's air sits at seventy to eighty-five per cent humidity for most of the year, and mould grows above about sixty-five per cent when nothing moves. Every storage decision in a flat is a humidity decision. Wardrobes need a gap behind them and space between hangers. Books need to stand up, not lie in a stack. Leather needs to be off the floor and out of plastic. Sealed plastic bags trap the moisture in the fabric and grow mould inside; breathable cotton bags do not. A dehumidifier in the closed bedroom is the single best purchase for a Saigon flat, and the desiccant tubs sold in every supermarket are a weak second. For things you are not using this season, the honest answer is that no cupboard in the flat is a good one. That is what the air-conditioned section of a storage facility is for, at 23 to 25°C, cooler and drier than any room in a flat in July, and it is where the wedding dress, the leather bag, the photographs and the guitar should spend the wet season.

The rotation

The flat has one season, so the rotation is not summer and winter; it is here and elsewhere. Twice a year, roughly at Tết and at the start of the rainy season, walk the flat with the zones in mind. Things that were used since the last walk stay. Things that were not go to the storage plan, or, if they fail the ownership test, out of your life. Things in the plan that you needed and did not have come back on the same delivery. The crew collects and returns the same way, photographs every item, and the portal shows what is where, so the rotation is a list, not a memory. A household that does this twice a year keeps a flat that looks like the photographs, without living like a monk.

The rooms one by one

The bedroom

Wardrobe at two-thirds full, this season only. Off-season and the previous size in a suitcase on the top shelf or in the plan. Under-bed space for bedding, never for paper or electronics. One dehumidifier. A small flat bedroom is a place to sleep; every box that lives in it makes it something else.

The living room

The room guests see and the family lives in. A storage bench or a low cabinet takes the games and the cables; nothing lives on the floor against the wall. Books that will be read again, in a bookcase with air behind it. Books that will not, given away. The exercise bike that has become a clothes hanger is the classic candidate for the plan; it comes back in a day when the resolution returns.

The kitchen

Daily cookware within reach, weekly in the cupboards, yearly out. The second rice cooker, the hotpot set for eight, the cake tins and the ice-cream maker take the space of a month of groceries and are used at Tết and birthdays. They store well in the standard section, clean and dry, and come back for the occasion.

The second bedroom, if there is one

The room that becomes the store room is the most expensive storage in the city, at the price per square metre of a Saigon flat. If it holds boxes rather than a person, empty it into a plan and make it a room again: a study, a nursery, a guest room, a room to rent. A Medium plan, 24 boxes, is roughly what a spare room full of boxes comes to, at 2,450,000 VND a month.

What the plan costs against the space it frees

A Small plan at 1,250,000 VND a month is a cupboard-and-a-half of the flat. A Medium at 2,450,000 VND is the second bedroom. Set that against the rent per square metre of the district you live in, or against the difference between the flat you have and the next size up, and the plan is usually the cheaper spare room by a wide margin. Collection is from 3,300,000 VND once; the free zone is Districts 1 to 5, Binh Thanh, Phu Nhuan and Go Vap, other districts add 150,000 VND to the collection, once. A three-month term takes 5% off, a year 15%.

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