The holiday season means decoration time. Pulling out boxes, bags and containers of all kinds of special treasures you’ve saved for embellishing your home every year and they are all marked “holiday”. Where to begin, but to open them all and start dragging items out until you find what you are looking for at that moment. Eventually you make your way through it all in time to enjoy the holidays for the family gatherings and entertaining of the season, only to be quickly followed by the dreaded post-holiday season of taking down those decorations and putting them away for another year. But did you know the post-holiday season is the best time to organize all those decorations?
Here are some organizing tips for making this a really productive organizing season too!
- This is the most perfect time to take stock of your exterior and interior décor. Has anything served its time well and is no longer useful, looks dated or worn, or anything you would ever use again? Now is the time to purge those items. If you are not going to use them next year, certainly do not take precious space and time to pack them up again. Donate what may be reusable to someone else that you won’t use again. Throw away anything that no longer is of use to anyone.
- Sort your items, keeping in mind you want to keep like and similar items together. Here are some examples of how to sort depending upon what you have; exterior décor from interior décor, exterior lights from Interior lights, wreaths, garlands, holiday linens, centerpieces, collections of holiday items should be grouped together, ornaments, candles, etc. You should now have everything sorted into categories so that all like items are grouped together.
- Now is the time to visually see the amount of the items you have and the size and shape of the containers you will need to store them in. There are many assorted storage containers available during this season for just this organizing event.
- When you pack your items away remember to use a little packaging paper or bubble wrap for any breakables so they are not just loose in a container.
- Label each container from the categories you made when sorting the items. Put the items in the corresponding containers. You may have multiple categories in one container. That’s ok. Just label what is in there.
- Now you are ready to store all your containers in their designated area until next year and you will now know exactly where everything is!
- There is another sorting option and that is to sort all the décor for each room into its own category, for example; Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, Family Room, etc. This is not advised for everyone but works for some folks that don’t like to think about where they are placing their decorations every year, so a designated container for each room works well for them.
When next year comes around you won’t be opening 10+ containers at once looking for certain items as you are trying to decorate. By sorting all of your holiday décor into categories and packing the décor into labeled containers will keep your décor organized and easy to access for the next season. You’ll look forward to knowing where everything is when you’re ready to decorate and knowing where everything belongs when you’re ready to put it away.
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This is the year that I’m going to organize my holiday decor items. Then I’ll start on all my jewelry-making supplies. Thanks for the great suggestions.
All great ideas. I also pack away holiday decorations based on the room where they are displayed. This way I can decorate one room at a time and all of the items for that room are together. This makes it easy to put away for next year too.
And take the batteries out of anything that is battery operated.