5 Quick Tips to Ease the Pain of Holiday Clean Up
Hoping your holiday was fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s clean up time! Here are 5 quick tips to help ease the pain of the clean up process.
Happy New Year my organizing friends! Hoping your holiday was fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s clean up time! Here are 5 quick tips to help ease the pain of the clean up process.
5 quick tips to help organize your holiday clean up.
Use clear bins if you can. Being able to see what’s in the bin is very helpful when taking items out next year.
2. Label, label, label! Label each bin with every item inside the bin. This seems tedious but you will be thankful next year. You can use a label maker or use the original label tape….masking tape and a sharpie! If you zone decorate like I do, don’t forget to add the zone label.
3. Using an extension cord reel or any type of cord organizer will help keep your lights from being a tangled mess. Label the lights so you know right where they go next year.
4. Label wreaths and garland with the location where they will be used. I use garland in 3 different spots and each garland is a different length. Knowing where the garland belongs saves us time and frustration.
5. Make sure to take the batteries out of anything being stored.
Once again, have a Happy New Year and happy organizing!
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The Guests Are Coming! The Guests Are Coming!
We are Southern and for us that means it’s that time of year, y’all! Time for turkey, hunting, football, cranberry sauce and Southern hospitality! While it’s sometimes fun to have family and friends in town, it can be stressful unless you plan it right! Let us give you 7 great organizing tips to make your guests feel as pampered as a Southern Belle and you feel relaxed about them being there!
We are Southern and for us that means it’s that time of year, y’all! Time for turkey, hunting, football, cranberry sauce and Southern hospitality! While it’s sometimes fun to have family and friends in town, it can be stressful unless you plan it right! Let us give you 7 great organizing tips to make your guests feel as pampered as a Southern Belle and you feel relaxed about them being there!
1. Clean, Comfortable Bedding
You will need clean and comfortable bedding for the guest bedroom. Clean being the more important of the two! Make sure all bedding is washed and the bed is made neatly. Yes, they might mind the Catahoula hound hair on the pillow! Make sure to have enough pillows and an extra blanket if needed. Here is a link to “How to Make a Bed,” in case you need some help
2. Clutter Free Space
Of course they want to see the 72 photos of you and your kids at the Saints game displayed on the nightstand, but they’d also like a space to rest their own personal items. They will need space for their luggage, phones, iPads, laptops, and other personal items. Make sure the bedside table is clear enough for them to have that space. Maybe just 1 photo of Drew Brees hanging on the wall will suffice? Having a little hanging space in the closet is considerate too. Move the debutante dresses to the other closet!
3. A Touch of Home
Help entertain your guests that have different sleeping habits than your family by providing soft lighting, water, snacks and entertainment. Lamps, books, Southern Living, Garden and Gun magazines, local brochures for nearby attractions as well as a Wi-Fi password provided for late night or early morning reading are a just few nice touches. Water and snacks like pralines, Satsuma’s or Zapp’s chips help a guest feel cozy and may make them forget that it’s 90% humidity outside on Thanksgiving Day. Did I mention they might need hair ties?
4. Guest Towels
In my house, I like to designate certain towels as guest towels so that my children don’t use them to wash the dog or clean up the mud on the floor. (Oh, who am I kidding. They wouldn’t do either of those things!) My guest towels don’t look like the others. They are actually white, for one. (Not dingy white and well loved) I place a clean bath towel, face towel and washcloth on the guest’s bed so they don’t have to go searching for what they can use. I have put these in baskets, tied them with a ribbon or just stacked them nicely. Any of those options makes the guest feel welcome.
5. The Often Forgotten Essentials
A nice basket or container of travel size toiletries is helpful if your guest forgot an important item such as a toothbrush or razor. This basket can include but is not limited to shampoo, body wash, conditioner, toothbrush, razor, mouthwash, toothpaste, dental floss, comb, hair ties or bug spray (Mosquito’s are like hawks, y’all). If your guests have small children, include toiletries geared for children as well.
6. A Clean Bathroom
Make sure that the bathroom is clean. This is especially important if your guests share the bathroom with my children. Uhm, I mean children. Any children.
7. Considerations of Accommodations
Extra special welcoming touches are felt in the small details. These might include simply a small vase of flowers or their very own trial size Tabasco sauce. It may also mean being aware of their food likes and dislikes, allergies and special needs. (Not everyone can tolerate our seafood.) Do they need space for a C-Pap machine, or a place to make bottles or drink milk-bourbon in the middle of the night? What are their favorite beverages or snacks?
All of these tips can help your guests feel relaxed and pass a good time while staying in your home. They let your guests feel that they are as wanted and welcome as Coach O after an LSU win! But be careful, if you are too kind, they might not leave. And as my mother-in-law likes to say, company and fish stink after about 3 days!
If you want to learn more about the 6 things that make up Southern hospitality, here’s a link!
Most importantly, y’all have a good time, cher! Laisses Bon Temps Rouler!
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Capsule Wardrobes, Closet Cleanouts, and Pre-holiday Decluttering
“Your home needs to be a place of calm, peace and fun,” Stewart says. “Focus on more of the family, and less on the stuff.”
This article was first featured in InRegister. Original Source.
Despite Louisiana feeling like an actual oven, summertime is nearly over. The days are getting shorter and schools are back in session. However, there is no need to succumb to summertime sadness, because fall is only a few short weeks away. Ah, the season of pumpkin spice and sweater weather. Well, not really the second one. The temptation to break out a cute sweater is almost unbearable, at least until you step outside. The South has no understanding of fall weather. So what do you do when it’s mid-November and still 90 degrees outside?
“Have a capsule wardrobe,” says Martha-Carol Stewart, founder and CEO of Chaos Organizing. The versatility of classic, staple pieces will make seasonal transitions easier, while also creating more closet space. A win-win.
Stewart, who started Chaos Organizing with a mission to help people organize their homes so that they could live efficiently, shares a few tips on how to calm your closet no matter what the wardrobe demands of the season require. The key, she says: Define your goal and then ask yourself if each item is helpful or hurtful toward your goal.
“You want your closet to feel like a happy place,” she says, not a room filled with clothes you no longer fit into. Create a pleasing aesthetic by using matching hangers, and organize by labeling and having a home for everything. “It simplifies life.”
Decluttering our homes is especially important during the fall as we prepare for the upcoming holiday season, Stewart notes. The holidays, she says, have a reputation of unforgivably filling homes with chaotic clutter.
After all, tis the season of decorations, cooking, candy and, of course, presents. Yes, holidays mean peace and joy, but let’s be honest, they can be stressful. Think endless trips to the attic for decorations, desperate searches for the perfect presents, and wrapping paper everywhere. Basically, a clutter nightmare. How to ease the pain? Organize it.
“Your home needs to be a place of calm, peace and fun,” Stewart says. “Focus on more of the family, and less on the stuff.”
To avoid losing your sanity searching for Christmas presents, Stewart recommends gifting “experience gifts” like concert tickets, spa days and gift cards, instead of tangible items. This no-stress-needed method takes the worry out of shopping, and prevents the possibility of Christmas presents becoming clutter.
“Emotions are more attached to experiences,” she says. “My son’s 18th birthday present was tickets to Paul McCartney, and he’ll never forget that.”
These types of experience gifts are about the gift of time, and creating memories that will last much longer than a scented candle or clothing.
Since spending time with family members is a staple of the holidays, Chaos Organizing is hosting a clinic to share their favorite holiday-decluttering tips to ensure that the season will be centered around family, not stress. The clinic will be held Tuesday, October 1, at The Royal Standard from 10 to 11 a.m. Stewart and her team of professionals will cover tips like decorating without clutter, organizing gift wrap and clutter-free gifts.
“My goal for this class is to each people how to find peace,” Stewart says. “My Christmases are so special now, and not anxiety ridden.”
Every day during the month of December, Chaos Organizing will post clutter-free gift ideas on its social media and blog posts. For more information about Chaos Organizing, and tips on how to create an organized home, click here.
Holiday Time
Amber is back and talking about one of our personal favorite organizing topics!
Amber is back and talking about one of our personal favorite organizing topics!
Do your organizing superpowers leave you on January 6th as quickly as Santa passing on his sleigh Christmas morning?
We are so eager to put out our Christmas decorations. The Thanksgiving turkey has barely cooled when many of us start displaying every Santa we own. We decorate beautiful trees with ornaments we’ve collected over the years. We adorn our mantles and doors with garland and wreaths. We light candles to make our home smell like gingerbread and Christmas trees. We shop for the perfect gifts then wrap them in beautiful paper with coordinating bows. Some of us go so far as to coordinate the wrapping paper and bows with our home décor. We plan. Oh, how we plan and it brings us such joy! We love everything about this holiday…
Until the beginning of January when all that planning and care goes straight out of the window!
Insert images of moving into your home here! Boxes, attics, yes, images of moving can quickly cloud our organizational sensibilities. Just get it put away, right? The holidays are exhausting and a new year is upon us. It’s time to move on.
Most of us are guilty of getting our boxes out of the attic and literally filling them with whatever fits into whichever box. We put things in spare shopping bags or leftover gift bags and haphazardly haul it all back into the attic vowing to reorganize everything “when we have time” so next year will be the first year of blissful holiday organization. It will be another piece of the holiday magic. Toy soldiers lined up waiting to be displayed.
The problem is we never find time to haul that stuff back down from the attic. The cute red and green containers we dream about are gone from the stores along with the holiday decorations and once again we say “next year”. “Next year” we are greeted with a hurricane of mismatched, unorganized boxes, crumpled bows, broken ornaments, etc. Wouldn’t it be great to schedule time after the Christmas rush to have a professional organizer come in and help?
A professional organizer can help you get your holiday decorations organized into the proper containers and label everything. A professional can help you create a system to keep track of what you own and what areas you might wish to enhance so when the new decorations arrive in the stores you won’t be tempted to make that impulsive buy and will actually purchase the items you need.
This is the gift I wish to receive!
Get a hard start on your gift giving this year and give the gift of a professional organizer to your loved ones! They’ll be grateful you did!
Tips for Un-Decorating the Christmas Decorations
Dear Mrs. Chaos,
How in the world do I find my house under all this Christmas Mess?
Sincerely,
Struggling and Overwhelmed!
Read more to find out how Mrs. Chaos tackles her un-decoration after the Christmas season.
“If you dream it, you can do it.” –Walt Disney
Dear Mrs. Chaos,
How in the world do I find my house under all this Christmas mess?
Sincerely,
Struggling and Overwhelmed!
Dear Struggling and Overwhelmed,
When the holiday is over and the magic has gone, it is so hard to find the energy for the cleanup process. Let the excitement of starting a new year be your motivation. My solution is to always grab my timer and label maker, and start small. I take down decorations in 30-minute increments so I never feel overwhelmed. I repeat this 3-4 times (or more) a day to accomplish what I need in that room, and I always take breaks when the timer goes off.
First and foremost, grab a trash bag and fill it up! All the leftover boxes, wrapping, ribbon pieces, Christmas cards (Oh, don’t start complaining! Truthfully, do you REALLY ever look at them again?), broken items, old receipts, not so fresh garland, empty containers…..you get the drift! This step really helps you focus on what needs to be put away.
Next, the kitchen is my first room to revive because it has to function at all times, especially during the holidays when everyone is home. Set your timer for 30 minutes and go! Everything on the counters should have a place of its own. All dishes should be washed and put away. New kitchen items will have to find their place, so you will have to be tough when making space. Donate items you truly don’t use. (That waffle maker that you MIGHT use once a year really shouldn’t be taking up prime kitchen real estate) If you handle it 30-minutes at a time, it doesn’t become overwhelming. Use your timer, and clean as you go.
Third, tackle the living room and entryway. This is where most of the Christmas decorations are in my house. I do this room in sections. I start at the mantle. Later on, I will tackle the tree. Next, I un-decorate the bookcase. So on and so on. My plastic bins are labeled so I know exactly what goes in each bin. As the bins are loaded, up to the attic they go! Then hang your wreaths on the attic rafter by their wreath hangers. If you don’t have enough wreath hangers, you can simply put a nail in the rafter.
This same 30-minute process can be continued in each room until all of the decorations are down and the new items have found homes. If you have “helpers” (for me that’s my teenage children), make the 30-minute segments fun by turning on music that they like. Oh, be sure to take photos of your decorated spaces so next year’s decorating is as easy as pie! Some organizers print the pictures and keep them in the containers for that particular space! Isn’t that brilliant?
Happy un-decorating!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Chaos
