Tips & Tricks to Organize all that Holiday Decor!

First, isn’t Christy’s master bedroom with the new gallery wall she created gorgeous? {If you missed it be sure to check it out!}. I admit I am itching to get back to my list of house projects that went on the back burner during the holidays, but before I can get back to those, I have to dig out from under all our holiday decor. I am a bit sad that all the holiday excitement is over but I am looking forward to the fresh start the New Year brings.

Since we’re working on our Operation: Organization 2016 series that will kick off very soon, when I set about de-holiday-ifying our home {you can see our decorated Holiday Home Tour HERE if you missed it} I decided I wasn’t going to just toss everything into the bins and stick it storage for another year like I usually do. It was time to get some control. I also figured it would make decorating next year much easier if I didn’t have to dig through every bin to just to find one decoration, as is usually the case.

I started by collecting and piling all our general decor {I started with everything non-tree related} in our Dining Room, which didn’t take very long. It quickly became a mess, but I wanted everything in one place and aside from this one room, the house immediately started looking cleaner and calmer. I brought a few of our holiday bins up from storage and set to work. {Our dining room doesn’t usually look like this, if you would like to see it without a hot Christmas mess, it’s HERE.}

I briefly considered going out to buy bins and new storage totes and really do it up right, but since I had no desire to venture out to pick up organizational supplies,  I shopped my house and came up with some extra plastic shoeboxes I’d had stacked in my closet. They are great for shoe storage, but in this house we have built-in shelves in our closet just for shoes. These were perfect to repurpose {you can get them for around $1 each}, I used them to separate smaller decorations by category into the bins.

Then I started taking the ornaments off our flocked tree, it’s been beautiful and I would love to keep it up longer but I knew it made more sense to put everything away at once.

An obvious way to speed up taking the ornaments off is to bring your bin with you to the tree and pile in the ornaments at the tree. I filled up the bin several times but sorted things back on my Dining Room table.

All the ‘flat’ ornaments went into one shoe box and since they took up so little space it held quite a few of them. I filled another bin with ribbons, and another with the decorative tree “picks”.  Just to be uber-organized then I grabbed my labeler and quickly marked the fronts of the tubs. I have a simple label maker and I have to say I use it all the time, it helped add some order to the chaos that was rapidly taking over!

Just another tip, I stored all these bins in one larger bin so that next year I can pull out one storage tote and go to town decorating our trees. And, of course I labeled it. 🙂

I still had plenty more ornaments to put away since I have bowls of them throughout our house, filling glass canisters, and basically any other place I could display them. My next organizing trick might be my favorite ever….some of my ornaments aren’t shatterproof and these fruit storage containers are PERFECT to hold fragile ornaments. These came with apples in them from Costco, so go buy some apples!

Then I slid these containers in the same larger bin along with more decorations for storage.

Even then, I still had more ornaments! I blame the fact that I have used a different color scheme each Christmas for the last several years, {again, there’s that self-proclaimed decor ADHD}.  Ziploc bags–and I keep the same ones from year to year–made light work of packing the shatterproof ornaments away. I set out the bags with a few different colored ornaments in each. It took no time to separate them by color and that way, no matter what color scheme I decide to use next year, decorating should be easy.

I also made bags for the ornaments for each of the smaller trees from the kids’ rooms and just packed them along with the trees. My aunt and uncle decorate multiple trees and they said they now just wrap the smaller trees in plastic {fully decorated} and store them standing up. If you have the space, that could be another option; I may try that in the future.

I still have to un-decorate our main family room tree. This one is filled with all our sentimental ornaments–the ones that the kids made in preschool, gifts etc. –of all shapes and sizes. I keep all but our most fragile ornaments {those stay in their original boxes} for that tree in one container, just like this one HERE.

These boxes hold a ton of ornaments, even the uniquely shaped ones, and we haven’t had any break while stored in the compartments. In fact, I think I may invest in a few more since they hold so many! Mine has 4 layers and zips closed; it’s awesome.

Phew! I am starting to gain some control of all this again…

My final step is still to organize the remainder into bins separated by rooms– like “kitchen” for all the dishes and towels, etc. we store away– but I am getting there. It’s definitely a process–as they say, what goes up must come down, right?!?

Once it’s all packed away I am ready to regroup and re-organize for the New Year. I don’t know what it is about the New Year but I can’t wait to get everything cleaned-out and cleaned up 🙂

Here is a simple image you can pin so you remember this come time to pack everything up…

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XO,

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