In my years of helping people organize their homes, the one kind of item that I have seen gobble up the most storage space is seasonal decorations. Here are some tips to help you reduce your collection to only your most cherished items.
Keep Only Your Best Items
This year, imagine you are a museum curator surveying your collection and picking only the best items to display. As you decorate, use and keep only the items that you think are particularly beautiful or have the highest sentimental value.
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Discard any broken, stained or unwanted items.
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Where you have multiples of an item, keep just a few that are in the best condition.
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Share your extra decorations with someone young who is setting up a new home or donate them.
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At the end of the holidays, purge any unused decorations. Try to resist buying new ones just because they are on sale.
Redefine Your Decorating Approach
Do you have lots of decorations, dishes and clothes with season-specific designs? Perhaps you have something like snowman coffee mugs or Christmas tree sweaters, but you can only use them for a short time of the year and they consume lots of your precious storage space.
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Instead of collecting many holiday-specific items, try substituting some decorations or clothes in multi-season colors without themed designs on them. For example, red is suitable for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
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White, silver, gold and black look good all year and give you more value than seasonal designs.
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See if you can reduce the holiday-specific items to one-third or one-fourth of your total decorations.
Storage suggestions
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Store decorations in clear plastic bins with lids that lock. Label the bins.
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For smaller items, store them in a plastic two or three-drawer set.
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Weed out large and oddly-sized items that are difficult to store.
Rachel M. Gambone is the owner of ReOrganize with Rachel, LLC. In addition to general home organizing, she specializes in helping you organize your office, papers and digital information. Her signature approach is positive organizing where she builds on your strengths, helps you find your treasures, and teaches you life-long organizing skills. See more organizing tips and a link to her free podcast at www.reorganizewithrachel.com.
