Design Crafters

Continuing on from yesterdays photo Christmas cards blog, here on some more post Christmas organization tips:

• When putting items away, consolidate the items that you’ll need the soonest. For example, Christmas cards, mailing labels, special Christmas envelopes, stamps, seals and stickers you may have. Leave this container near the top or front when storing the items.

• Be sure to label all your containers in order to take the guess work out when it comes time to breaking into them again. Less rummaging, less mess, less confusion, less frustration.

• Some people randomly throw things into the storage containers and then have to rummage through them the next year, usually making a big mess. Keep like items in the same containers. For example, you could keep all your outdoor Christmas decorations in one container (or how ever many you need). Some people have so many outdoor Christmas decorations they need to have separate containers for outdoor lights and others for outdoor wreathes, inflatable decorations, etc. You can even have a container designated solely for Christmas tree decorations, or Christmas dishes.
• One space utilizing idea is to use Christmas linens (napkins, table clothes, etc.) to protect the breakables. For example, we use them to wrap around our Christmas plates instead of using bubble wrap.  We’ll also stuff our Christmas pillows in with our breakables to act as a soft buffer for  the breakables in case they bounced around at all.

Well, I hope these ideas helped you out. Have a wonderful winter day.

Have you even noticed when you’re organizing and tidying up things tend to get messier before they get tidier? At least that’s the case with me. Then there are those superhuman friends that you envy because they seem to get it all done super fast in a super organized fashion.  If you’re anything like me, you probably dread putting away the Christmas decorations.  I dread it for two reasons. #1 The mess factor, #2 The house seems so naked once the decorations are down.

Well, here are some tips I ran across that may help both you and me out with the post Christmas cleanup.

• First and foremost, remember that you don’t have to do it all at once. Do one thing at a time and try really hard to stay focused on that one thing. This will help keep the messy chaos to a minimum.
• Use sturdy plastic containers (like the Rubbermaid kind) vs cardboard boxes. It’s a little more expensive than regular cardboard boxes at first but in the long run it’s worth it. These will protect the Christmas decorations from moisture and rodents. One year one of our cardboard boxes had somehow gotten wet in the storage shed. When we opened it up at Christmas, the fabric items had gone moldy and reeked to high heaven. That was the last year we had cardboard boxes. I even found some red and green containers that now help me know immediately which ones contain Christmas items. The guess work and rummaging is taken out this way.

Stay tuned for tomorrows photo Christmas cards blog on more organization tips.