The holidays may be the most wonderful time of the year, but some argue they’re also the messiest. Your home can go from clean to cluttered in no time thanks to all the decorations, wrapping, incoming and outgoing gifts, not to mention all the extra holiday food and the cooking it takes to make it. So how do you stay on top of all that mess? “The Home Edit” ladies have some ideas.
Expert organizers Joanna Teplin and Clea Shearer, stars of the Netflix series “Get Organized With The Home Edit,” offer advice for managing holiday clutter.
- Storing holiday decorations - When January rolls around and it’s time to tackle taking down the tree, it’s tempting to just toss everything into boxes and stash it away until next December. The thing is, when you take it all down next year, you’ll be dealing with a mess. That’s why these pro organizers recommend sorting through all of your decorations and doing an “edit” before packing them up, which means going through and getting rid of unwanted or broken items. “Give yourself the gift for the next year and get organized on the back end so you’re ready on the front end,” Joanna says.
- Out with the old - Before the newly unwrapped gifts start piling up, the ladies advise going through your stuff to “create room for the inevitable gifts that are coming in.” You can do it with your kids, so they’ll have space for their new toys and gear, and do a “pass” through your own belongings and clear out what you don’t want or need so you have room for your new arrivals.
- For Christmas clean-up - When you’re hosting the holidays, you get to avoid the headache that holiday travel can be, but you’re still hard at work with all the cleaning, prepping, cooking, decorating and wrapping. And according to “The Home Edit” experts, there’s one person who wouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up after the last guest leaves. “One hundred percent, if you cook, you don’t clean,” Clea says.
- On practical Christmas gifts - The duo also weigh in on whether it’s okay to give practical presents like vacuum cleaners or pots and pans. “Sometimes practical gifts are the things we don’t buy ourselves and we actually do need them or could use them,” Clea says. Joanna points out that it depends on if the person really wants the thing, like if they’re into cooking and want new pots and pans, that’s different than giving them to someone as a passive aggressive way to tell them you want them to cook more. Same goes for gifting a gym membership to someone that didn’t ask for it, which Joanna says “is a little rude.”
Source: Today