Great tips for holiday storage {that make the next year MUCH easier!}

Hello there and happy new year! I hope you had a lovely holiday season! I didn't mean to take two weeks away, but I've been busy getting the Christmas decor put away and it took longer than I thought. 

I forgot when I was putting it up that I have to put it allll away. ;) Although in general I find putting holiday decor away is much faster and easier than setting it up. This year I bought new storage bins, so I reorganized and the whole process took longer than usual. 

I'm sharing my Christmas decor organization methods and a few tips I've figured out along the way! 

I will tell you off the bat that this won't be one of my thriftiest organization posts. I spend a little extra to make things easier and more efficient when I pull things out for the next year. (But they will last from year to year!) These little tips save my sanity each November when the holiday decor comes back out! 

-- Label your decor for next year --

My first tip is to label as much as you can -- especially the stuff you put up in the same spot every year. I have found over the years that labeling light strands I use for specific areas helps a TON!: 

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You can find my awesome label maker here! This smaller version works great too -- it's just a little more basic. Both are super easy to use. 

I label any spot that uses more than one strand of lights -- both inside and outside. So when I get them out I know exactly how many bushes or trees are covered by that group of lights. I also label them inside, like the strands on our stair garland. That way I'm not trying to figure out how many I used the year before. 

I use a LOT of these remote plugs and switches for our indoor lights -- I store them away with the lights that need a remote, like on our stairs. I just keep them plugged into the light strand. 

If you have more than one set of these remotes, you know the joy of trying to figure out which one goes with which remote. ;) I label the matching sets so we know what goes with what: 

-- Store your trees upright! --

Next up is the trees! We have...uhhh, quite a few. ;) My dream my whole adult life has been to store our Christmas trees upright -- and not take ONE thing off of them each year. Yes...this is the stuff that makes me giddy. 

Well in this house, my dreams were realized, at least for some of our trees! We have a storage room in the basement with plenty of room to store our two basement trees upright. 

I found this stand up Christmas tree bag years ago and it works GREAT! You just place it over the tree and tuck the branches in here and there -- it zips up and then cinches as well: 

You may have to fluff a little the next year, but otherwise everything stays put!

I loved that cover so much, I went to buy another one -- but they were sold out. I looked around some more online and ended up with these plastic tree covers and they work just as well: 

They are made for nine foot trees so are plenty big for our seven to eight foot trees. It's so roomy that it's easy to grab up the extra and tie it at the bottom. To carry them around, one of us grabs the top and one the bottom. You'll be surprised at how much stays put! 

We've stored a couple of our trees like this for years and they look almost perfect when we uncover them the next holiday season. It saves a TON of time -- you just need to have the space. And really, they don't take up much more space than the horizontal bags, you just have to have the vertical storage space. 

-- Designated spot for Christmas decor --

For years we stored all of the Christmas decor in our basement, but I realized a few years in that it was a major chore to get it all upstairs (sometimes two flights). Since then I've stored everything in our garages. 

This year I treated myself to new, clear storage bins for our Christmas decor. I'm a geek -- it made me so happy! Our old bins were covered with paint or busted up. I wasn't sure how I'd feel about seeing everything inside -- I was worried it would feel too messy. 

But I LOVE IT: 

Ahhhh I can't even tell you how NICE it is to see everything! I was going to label each bin, but decided against it once I got everything in there. There's no need really. 

I did a serious purge of all our decor before putting everything back. I haven't really gone through the Christmas decor in years. I chose to use more smaller bins instead of larger ones we had in the past. 

We had similar wood shelves built up to the ceiling in our last garage, and we loved it so much we had them built again in just the second day in this house! 

Up till now this corner has had a mix of holiday and other random stuff, but I decided to make it all seasonal this year. It's mostly Christmas, but I have Halloween and Fourth of July stuff here too. 

By the way, I organize my seasonal decor by item, not room. I put all garland in one bin, extras for the tree in another, soft stuff like towels and pillow covers are all together and general decor is in its own bin.  This makes it easy for me to switch things up room to room every year! 

These are the bins I used -- all of them have latching handles. I used this small clear bin for most of the decor: 

I already had some of these, then got more. THEN I found out that these are $4 cheaper each! Argh. 

This medium storage bin is the perfect size: 

And this bigger one is great for bigger stuff like our outdoor decor: 

Somehow I ended up with way more room than we had before! I am determined to NOT fill that!: 

It's killing me a little that those two bins on the left are different. Ha!! We already had those so I didn't want to replace them for basically the same thing. But...

We had these shelves built to fit the big parts of our giant family room tree -- if you build something similar, make sure to measure your bins and then build your shelves so you can stack numerous bins on each one. 

Do you do anything specific with your holiday storage that makes the next year easier for you? These tips help me a ton -- especially the stand up tree covers!

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