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In Part 1 of this series, I talked about why it isn’t a good idea to store your seasonal items pell mell by just throwing them in the attic or the closet—and why leaving them out all year is an even worse idea because they just get in your way.

Now I want to talk about some seasonal storage ideas which do work. But first let’s talk about some of the types of items you need to store.

There are three main types of seasonal items which you will want to put away for most of the year (in most locations).

1. Winter gear: Coats, scarves, mittens, gloves, boots, ski and snowboarding equipment, sleds, heavy sweaters, heavy blankets, etc. Most of these items are bulky and take up way too much space when they are not being used.
2. Summer gear: Swimwear, goggles, pool toys, summer sports gear, summer clothing which isn’t suitable for winter, etc. It can be very tempting to leave these items in your closets, drawers, and mudroom throughout the year since many of them do not take up a lot of space. But they still do take up space, and can easily get misplaced while you are not actively using them.
3. Holiday items: Ornaments, décor and party supplies for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Easter, and so on.

I recommend that all of these items be kept separate from one another so that you can find them quickly and easily. You should take this into account when creating your seasonal storage solutions. Since you will essentially be trading your winter gear for your summer gear and vice versa, you can probably use the same set of seasonal storage containers for both. When the weather starts warming up, you pull your summer gear out of your storage totes, and stash your winter gear inside. When it starts cooling down again, you just switch them again.

I recommend that you purchase a number of holiday plastic bins, one for each celebration. For Christmas, you probably will need several, including Christmas ornament storage bins.

Label all of your bins clearly, and if you can, you should stick with clear plastic storage totes. That way you can see at a glance what is inside each of your containers. Where should you put them? There you have a number of options. Some people have space in their basements or attics for their seasonal storage totes. Others may end up putting them in a hall closet. Basically, you can probably put them wherever you used to store your seasonal items, but the bins will keep them organized and free of dust.

As with any organizational project in the home, it takes some time to come up with a system that works for you. But once you do, you will be very glad you did. You will finally get seasonal items out of the way when you are not using them, and when you need them again it will be so much easier to find them.