I've been through about every storage method that could be discovered on this earth. I began when I was a teenager back in the early 1960s with orange juice cans, back when they were made of steel, you needed a can opener and they only came in the little-bitty size. I've done the matchboxes, gluing bunches of them together, but they didn't hold up well for me.
I finally ended up in the 1970s and 1980s buying 50-drawer Akro-Mills parts cabinets when Wal-Mart, our big U.S. discount chain, would have them on sale for $12 each, buying two at a time. Since then, I've acquired others of varying sizes as well as big industrial steel storage drawers. Now, I have around 600 little plastic drawers available and around 120 big metal drawers and still run out of space. I have the little divided plastic boxes, shoeboxes, bins, etc.
The problem with our hobby is that the parts are so varied in size (transformers and motors down to SMT) and a single type of part such as a resistor can have 150 values each for 2W, 1W, 1/2W, 1/4W and 1/8W making storage a nightmare. In the case of resistors, I use four 36-drawer parts cabinets for my most-used 1/4 watt resistors, stacking them for six columns of 24 drawers for all values from 10 ohms to 9.1M ohms. All the other power ratings ("wattages") are stored in the metal drawers by value, all wattages mixed together in each value. I keep all my 1% resistors in small coin envelopes, one per value. Doing those in drawers would be prohibitive at 96 values per decade.
ICs, transistors and diodes are also in the parts drawers, but I long ago quit trying to keep them in any kind of numerical order as any new parts always created havoc. Now they go into numbered spaces ("drawer 84, section D") and I use the word processor to keep track of the parts letting it do the alphabetizing, looking up "2N3904" to find "34B" listed for the location while "2N3906" may have location "53D". That way, I can allot the proper amount of space for the number of parts of each type I have and move their location if they all get used up to allow for other parts or if I get bunches more in where I need more room.
I've gotten 'way off on a tangent here. The whole point I was really going to make was that you ought to go ahead and get some decent parts storage, but do it as you can afford it. Buy a cabinet now and another one later. Just try to keep them all the same brand and size so that they'll later stack nicely together for a storage system.
Dean