Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. How’s your house looking? A little cluttered perhaps?
After any celebration with gifts – Christmas, Hanukkah, a birthday, wedding, or baby shower – you will need to do a little work readjusting your space. Here are a few tips.
Gifts You Don’t Want: Twice the Gratitude
My number one tip is this: you don’t have to keep anything. Truly. The only thing you have to do is thank the gift-giver for their generosity!
Gift-giving is a ritual. It recognizes important relationships and important occasions. Once the gift has been given and received with thanks, the ritual is over. That’s why you now describe the item in the past tense: “It was a gift.” Now it’s just an ordinary object again.
Did the gift-giver hope you would treasure the item? Probably. But as a gift-giver yourself, you know that not every present hits the bullseye. It’s the thought that counts. So if you no longer want an item – 5 minutes, 5 days, or 5 years after it was gifted to you – let it go. I love Marie Kondo’s practice of thanking items when you get rid of them, and recommend you do that here. Then, donate it, regift it, recycle it, or pitch it, as appropriate.
To recap: Thank the gift-giver. Thank the gift. Let it go.
Think Outside the Box
You like the gift and want to keep it? Wonderful! My second tip it to cast a critical eye on the original packaging. In most cases, I advocate getting rid of it and replacing it with something more user-friendly. Generally packaging is designed to support shipping and sales, not storage. Consider the following:
- Toy Sets – My go to storage for toy sets are clear, shoe-box sized containers with removeable lids. Make sure your kids have an appropriately sized bin for each new set, and make sure they or you label it to make clean up easier. If your kids are old enough to safely handle zip-top bags, I recommend the ones with sliders in either a one-gallon or two-gallon size.
- Small Appliances – Appliances often come with seldom used accessories. Like toy sets, house these in a small lidded bin. Often one container is big enough for the accessories from two or more appliances. Toss in the product manual if you think you’ll need help identifying what component goes with what appliance.
- Arts, Crafts, and Tools – Pros generally house their equipment in things like art caddies, sewing baskets, and tool boxes. Why not treat your hobbies with the same care?
- Dust Jackets – If the same picture is printed directly on the book’s cover, I advocate recycling the jacket. Most likely it will just get ripped anyway.
A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place
Tip 3 is to explicitly designate a place for each new item to live when it’s not in use. In some cases, this will mean getting rid of something else to make room. For example, I strongly recommend keeping a strict space budget when it comes to clothing and shoes: Each person gets so many hangers, so many drawers, and so much shelf space. In order to add new pieces, some of the old ones have to go.
In other cases, I recommend adding or adjusting storage furniture. This is especially important for kids. The cube shelf that perfectly housed large toddler toys and over-sized picture books won’t be well suited to heavy, small toys (Matchbox cars, Lego, etc.) and compact chapter books. Short on floor space? Replace shorter pieces with taller pieces or look to wall-mounted storage.
Kaloumi Small Home Organizing is based in Edgewater, Chicago. If you live in Chicago or in the near north suburbs and would like my help in person, please contact me today!