PERSONAL SELF STORAGE

Decluttering

Keepers

• Hold onto clothes that are in season and that you wear regularly.
• Keep at home practical items in regular use like silverware, towels, bedding, and soap dishes.
• Retain often used furniture.
• Keep photos and wall hangings that add a spark to the décor.
• Hold onto board games and enough toys to fill your child’s toy box.
• Keep enough of your college student’s objects to make them feel at home when they visit.
• File current bills and private documents like social security cards and bank account information at home.
• Show off collectors’ items in a display cabinet.
• Make room for sporting gear that someone in the house uses every few days (basketballs, yoga mats, bikes and more).
• Carve a niche for that emergency household tool kit.

Self Storage-bound

• Store out-of-season clothing and footwear.
• Box up extra items that clutter your cupboards like excess towels, the good silver used only on holidays, extra blankets needed only in winter, and toothbrush holders that have been replaced by a fresh design.
• Store the rocker that only grandma sits in when she visits every six months or the footstool that no one uses but everyone trips over.
• Store photos and wall hangings that make the room look too busy or just don’t fit your current design scheme.
• Pack away extra toys that you have no room for. Rotate them in and out every few weeks so that your child can enjoy all of them. Involve your child in the decisions.
• Put away your college student’s bags, balls, and other belongings that spill out of his closets into other rooms or that make his room uncomfortable for guests.
• Stash tax documents and other papers that may be needed but are seldom reviewed.
• Store collectors’ items that take up too much room and don’t look good on display. If you have several collections or many items, you may want to rotate them.
• Pack up out-of-season sporting gear.
• Bundle garden tools together in the off-season and stick them in a garbage bin in your self storage unit.
• Ultimately, use your discretion to decide what stays and what goes. Label your stored goods well. If you are keeping them, you should rotate what you can into daily use every so often.

Seasonal Self Storage

Ornaments

• Run used gift wrap and tissue paper through a paper shredder and use the fluffy strips as filler.
• Keep fragile ornaments at the top of a box.
• Egg cartons are perfect for tiny ornaments.
• Have a partitioned cardboard wine box? Use it to store tissue-wrapped ornaments. Several ornaments can be stacked on top of each other in each slot.
• Reuse a shirt box or shoebox to store ornament hangers. Fill it with hooks, rolls of small ribbon, cording, scissors, twist ties and craft wire – everything you’d need to replace the inevitable lost hanger.
• Store food-based decorations (like the cinnamon and applesauce ornaments your kids bring home from school) in sandwich bags to protect them from humidity, and then place the bags in an empty cookie tin to keep rodents out.

Garland

• Store bulky garlands in large plastic storage boxes. You can push a lot into a big box, since there’s nothing to break, and the garlands can be fluffed out.
• Mark the center of a long swag with a colored twist tie before you remove it so you won’t have to measure it again next year.
• Label segments of garland with a pen and masking tape as you take it down so you’ll always know which piece to hang in the entryway and which is just the right size for the mantel.

Lights

• Instead of coiling your lights in a bundle that somehow turns into a big tangled ball, wrap them around empty wrapping paper tubes and tape the ends of the string to the tube.
• Put extra bulbs and fuses in a sandwich bag and place inside the tube.