3 Keys Thursday: 3 Keys to Mixing Organizing with Decorating

Photo: Dodgerton Skillhause via Morguefile

I am, as usual, a little behind in my Christmas preparations. The situation is far from dire -- the house is decorated (for the most part) and, thanks to my husband, the tree is up and ready to be decorated when my daughter gets home this weekend.

But, thanks to my daughter, I'm a little ahead in the sorting and organizing department. When she was home for Thanksgiving, we raided the crawlspace and pulled out decorations she might want, along with the old standards we put out every year.

The holidays provide a built-in opportunity for taking stock, weeding out the things we no longer use and filling in the gaps with things that suit our current needs. Here are three keys to mixing a little organizing into your decorating.

As you take things out, take inventory of your containers. Can you lift them? Find what you need? Are like items stored together, or are the ornaments mixed in with the outside lights? As you take things out, think about how you'd prefer to take them out next year. Then, make a list of what you need to make it happen.

Plan by style. Using a system that sucks the joy out of decorating? Maybe it's backbreaking (like my crawlspace), unwieldy (those big bins that looked so roomy in the store are just plain heavy when they're full of decorations) or confusing (endless stacks of identical brown boxes). Re-evaluate your system now and upgrade it with containers that work for your styles. If you can hold off revamping your system until after the holidays, you might even get what you need on sale.

JillWellington via Pixabay

One in, one out. If you, like me, enjoy hitting the after Christmas sales, or if everything old is not new again, make room for additions to your collection by weeding out any decorations you haven't used in the past two years. Then, when you buy a new treasure, get rid of something old. Fortunately, even exchanges are pretty easy to pull off with things like decorations, and even easier when we're replacing something that's stopped working with something style-specific.

The goal here is to plan what comes next so that after the holidays, when the craziness subsides, you can put your plan into action. Then next year at this time, you can decorate with style.