Changing Seasons: A Storage Saga

I hear faint rustle. There's a breeze. My nose twitches at fresh crisp air. My senses flood my brain with warnings. Flashing yellow lights, lights the color of falling leaves. Red sirens, sirens that sound like ripe apples falling from trees. Warning: Fall is moving in.

What was just warm, humid and still, is now cool, dry, on the move. Like the changing landscape outside, life in our homes begin to move too. Children pack off to school, sweaters come out of closets, boots march towards the front door. It seems as though the house shrinks during theses changes. The sudden influx of extra layers crowd our shelves as we try to keep the shorts and tees on for one more day. Hot tea warms on the stove dirtying another dish after a long summer of paper plates and dinner cooked on the grill.

So what to do with all this stuff, how do we make the best out of a season between seasons.


1. Easy on Easy Off.
A chest at the end of the bed is an easy access way to store extra blankets or sweaters. You won't have to dig for items you want to pull out quick when your cold and bleary eyed mid way through the night or you decide to grab an extra layer after being confronted at the door by a blast of cold morning air.


2. The 3 B's,
Boxes, Bags and Baskets are smart functional and chic ways to organize and store clutter. Finding a style that matches your personality and is sized right for the item is key to making it work. Even in your junk drawer you can reinstate order by using old coin purses to corral stray batteries, a worn clutch works great as a pencil case. Decorative boxes pull double duty as table accents with the benefit of hiding the coasters and a deck of cards for a rainy day game of canasta.

3. Saying Goodbye
Of course there are always some things that now matter how many times you click you heels you just can't seem to make them go away. These are things you probably moved more than once in your life, maybe it started as your favorite shirt then it slid to the back of the closet, then got pushed around to a few other hiding spots. These things may even have been packed up brought to a new home and never made it back out of the box to see the light of day. It's time to say good bye. Cleaning up and organizing your garage is a great job for an early fall day. But before summer goods are packed off for 2 seasons of cold storage check the corners and closets and pull out the things you never touched this summer. The old shepard's hook with the broken wind chime, the cracked cherub statue, the stack of t-shirts that all seemed to have collected a spot of bleach, paint, or raspberry cobbler. Bag it, Tag it, and move it off your floor.


Remember cleaning out the old means making way for new.
Warning: Happy Shopping days ahead...