The holiday season is upon us and whether you are cooking, hosting, or just expecting some increased foot traffic around the house, now is the perfect time to do a light cleaning to make sure the holidays go off without a hitch. This time of year can be so stressful and the last thing that anyone needs is for the easy things to be made difficult by a cluttered house. No matter what your situation is this year, here are a few ideas and tips to help you keep everything moving smoothly so you can enjoy the season to the fullest.
Perennial Problems
When it comes to keeping the house clean and organized, the toughest part of the holidays can be the huge amount of decor that only comes out once a year. Halloween and Thanksgiving have just passed, and December is chock full of festivities so you might have more skeletons, turkeys, floral arrangements, and colored lights than you could ever know what to do with. The best first step when confronted with so much variety to sort and clean is always to have a plan; that plan can be as simple as a cheap plastic bin and a sharpie, or as elaborate as a rethinking of your garage layout to accommodate your ever-changing storage needs.
Partners like Just Dump it can take care of organizing, sorting and disposing of your holiday "stuff", and offer a few tips based on their 15 years of experience to help you tackle the tinsel, turkeys, and other accumulated stuff.
Pick a system. You should give some thought to how you want to collect your items, be it by size, usage, holiday, or durability. If sorting by holiday, make sure to give some thought to multipurpose items (i.e.string lights) and consider keeping them together so that you don’t have to rummage through your Thanksgiving bin just to find out that someone moved the lights to the Christmas bin. Additionally, you should always at least somewhat take durability into consideration, and refrain from putting delicate ornaments in the same place as larger, more unwieldy objects.
Pack with purpose. It might seem easy, once you have your bins all marked, to just sort and push out of mind. However, in a year's time you’ll remember why you wanted to make the change in the first place. Being methodical will help you make sure that your solutions are going to last until it’s time to pull everything out again next year. When dealing with certain problem objects (looking at string lights and everything that they tangle with) you should always move with a sense of what is coming. Don’t just leave string lights in a big lump and hope that they don’t come out of the bin a mess, instead you should grab a nearby cylinder - a used wrapping paper tube for example - and wrap the lights around tightly. A piece of tape to keep it from unraveling will ensure that the next time you need them those lights will be easy to grab and put up (also a handy spot to write the color of the lights if all of your strings are identical).
Find a home for everything. Once you have it all packed you might have a couple new problems to deal with, namely finding a place to put the bins. The best thing to keep in mind is that the goal is to reduce clutter, not increase it. This means no bins in hallway closets that see year round usage, no bins in the living room “just for a couple weeks”, and definitely no bins just left wherever the packing was completed. Obviously garages and sheds are prime locations, but consider putting bins with hard decorations (metal, ceramic, plastic) in a covered area outside to save precious internal space. Special decorations like heirlooms or centerpieces might be best off if sequestered and kept in a very small (labeled) box in the home, so that you can always know where it is when the season rolls around again. If you find that all of your storage space is taken already, then consider hiring a dumpster or a junk removal service such as Just Dump It to get rid of some of the clutter.
However, you might have also noticed that you have some decorations that just don’t have a place in your home anymore. Whether it’s form or function, you just can’t always keep everything in use, especially as the new decorations you accumulate through the years acquire a place in you and/or your families hearts. Just because it is the season for sentimentality doesn’t mean that you need to hold on to it all. Hiring a junk removal service is perfect even if you’re only getting rid of a couple bins, and saves you time in the busy holiday season. And, since it’s also the season for giving, Just Dump It will even collect items for donation and spread the holiday cheer to those in need. All you need to do is box it up and make the call; you have all the time you need to make the holidays as joyous as they can be.
Whatever your needs are this year, if you stick with these tips, and Just Dump It, you’ll have smooth holidays to enjoy.
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