IHeart: Our Holiday Storage

Is everyone still alive after the holiday craze?  The New Year has officially begun and it's time to regain control of our schedules and normal lifestyles again.  Although, I still have a holiday hangover, I couldn't wait to get back into the organizing swing of things!

We had a total of FOUR Christmas's this year, all away from home so if you count our own family one with the kids at home, it was really five!  I think that is a Jones family record, I am tired just typing about it {you can catch up on some of our Christmas highlights here}.

Yesterday, I packed up all of the holiday decor.  It was bittersweet, it always adds so much color and life and happiness, yet at the same time, it's nice to get back to some sort of normal around here.

I had shared a couple of years back how we handle storing all of our holiday decorations:

Fairly organized, yes.  However, all those bins take up a ton of space.  And this year I was so frustrated with myself because even though I had labeled the bins, I still had to pull one off of the other to open the lid and dig inside to see if what I wanted was there {sometimes yes, sometimes no}.  That's the problem with bins that are not see through.  Plus, our Christmas lights were a giant tangled mess which made the entire processing of decorating the tree take about triple the time.

I was determined to do better this year, so that next Christmas things go a little smoother.  Plus, I have a goal to better utilize our utility storage room {which I will show you once our lower level remodel is done and all of our excess supplies are out}, which meant condensing our holiday storage the best that I could.

So I started from scratch this year.  I took everything off of the tree and our shelving display and created giant piles in our living room.  Then, I gave myself a pat on the back for my ability to get everything stored into two bins instead of three!  It's OK to do some super smiling when you have organizing success!

After some donating and tossing, I was able to keep only what we use and love, yet I still have about as much or more decor than the last time I posted about it.  I must just be getting smarter with age... lol.

So how did I do it?  Well, I used Ziploc bags for just about EVERYTHING.  They take up far less room than the bulky plastic boxes that most of the decorations originally came in.

I find that the bags from IKEA are my favorite for storage.  They last longer and are larger than the Ziploc brand bags:

This bin has so many items in it such as shatterproof ornaments, beads, cones, ribbon, a cookie plate, holiday countdown, printables, etc... The storage bags really made things fit perfectly and maximized the space inside the bin.

I use a disposable food storage container for all of the little things, like ornament hooks and extra Christmas light bulbs:

And a manila folder to hold all of my printables and banners:

The lower bin is full of linens at the bottom, and all of our twinkling lights at the top:

Thanks to the www, I found that you can save space and tangles by wrapping individual strands of lights around objects, like coffee cans or cardboard pieces!  So we cut up a spare box leftover from Christmas and had fantastic space saving, untangled light storage!

It worked like a charm!

We keep all of our fragile ornaments and special ornaments made by the kids inside the stacking ornament bins.  We have been doing that for years and nothing has broken so we are not changing a good thing!

Now because I have two bins that look the same with tons of different items inside, I decided to get creative with the labeling process.

I started out by folding a piece of decorative cardstock in half, and laminating it into a pouch {like I did with my coupon envelopes}:

After attaching the pouches to the sides of the bins with a piece of Velcro, I am able to write a list of the bin contents and tuck it right into the pouch!

Now, since I can't see all of the contents through the bin, I can just pull out the list and know everything that is inside!

And if things ever change, I just cross stuff off, add new things to the bottom, and we are good to go!

In fact, I love this idea SO much, that I have more storage bins for other items that I will be doing this to in the future as I continue on my organizing quest!  The thought of no more unstacking, peeking inside, and re-stacking, makes me H A P P Y!

Feels good to have my first of many 2012 organizing projects checked off of the list!

Anyone else find new holiday storage ways this year, that left you with a big ol' grin?  How many Christmas's did you attend?  Anyone have me beat?