The holidays have come and gone, and now you are hunkered down for the next few months of the New York winter. There will be TV shows to watch, good books to read, and evenings spent with friends and family. But there will also be times when nothing in particular needs to be done. This is the time to think about doing a little reorganizing at home.
January is a great month for reorganization for a couple of reasons. First, winter is the season we tend to spend more time indoors than out, making it the perfect time to focus on making indoor spaces more comfortable and less cluttered. Second, January is the month we take down those Christmas decorations and store them away for yet another year. Taking down and packing up decorations is also a good time to clean the floors, dust, and perhaps even reorganize the storage space as well.
Cleaning Up After the Decorations
If you are the kind of person who likes to decorate for a month or so, you know how much dust and dirt can accumulate around the tree or on the shelves where you placed the special Christmas items that mean so much. Putting the decorations away also means cleaning the spaces before you return them to their former state. So here’s the thing: as long as you are vacuuming in the corner where the trees stood, why not run the vacuum along the entire baseboard and around the windows as well?
As long as you are dusting one or two shelves where Christmas decorations stood, why not dust all of them before moving on to the coffee table, TV stand, and piano? The idea here is to take advantage of your mindset to clean and restore. You are already in that mode in order to get the Christmas decorations away; you might as well take advantage of it while you are on a roll.
A Nice Change Before Spring
Using down time in January to get a little reorganizing done offers an added benefit of providing a nice little change before spring arrives. Let’s face it, January and February in the Northeast can be a bit disheartening with cold temperatures and gray skies. Redesigning some interior spaces can give you a fresh new perspective and make the house feel new again. That could be just enough to carry you through the end of March and into early April’s spring flowers.
Any desire to reorganize during the winter months should probably focus on the rooms you use the most. That means the family room, dining room, or kitchen for most people. We have a few ideas.
Rearrange the family room by choosing a new furniture arrangement and changing out some of your decorative pieces. A very popular and easy idea is to increase your art collection so that you can switch out the pictures on your walls three or four times per year. Just swapping out your art can do amazing things for the family room.
In the dining room or kitchen, but together a new centerpiece for the table or reorganize the china cabinet. You could step back and evaluate the kitchen to see if it works as efficiently as possible. If not, finding different places for your appliances or reorganizing the cupboards might do the trick.
As long as you will be spending more time indoors during the winter months, you might just as well take advantage of that time. Use January to reorganize after you take down the Christmas decorations and store them away. You’ll have fresh new spaces you can enjoy with all of your indoor winter activities.