Storing decorations so next year is not an archaeology dig

Decorations have an unusual ratio: eleven months in a box, a few weeks out. Everything about how they are stored is therefore decided by somebody in a hurry who wants the job finished, which is why the boxes are the way they are.

The trick is to spend the effort on the way in, when you will never see the benefit, so that the person unpacking next year has an easy time.

Lights: wind them onto something

Tangled lights are the single largest time cost in decorating, and they are entirely preventable. Wind each string around a rigid object rather than coiling it loosely:

• A rectangle of stiff cardboard with notches cut in each end
• An offcut of timber
• A purpose-made reel if you want to buy one

Then label the string with where it goes and how long it is. "Tree, 200, working" is worth more next December than any amount of tidiness.

Test each string as you wind it, not next year. A dead string discovered in January is a thing you replace calmly in the sales. Discovered in December, it is a trip out on the worst shopping weekend of the year.

Ornaments: compartments, not padding

Loose ornaments in a box of tissue paper migrate and collide. What works is compartments — anything that keeps each one in its own space:

• Purpose-made ornament boxes with card dividers
• Wine boxes with the dividers left in, which are free and almost perfectly sized
• Egg cartons for very small ones

Wrap the fragile individually inside the compartment. Heaviest at the bottom of the box, always.

Wreaths and garlands

Wreaths crush. They want a box only slightly larger than they are, stored flat, with nothing on top. Hanging them on a hook in a large bag also works well if you have the space.

Garlands should be coiled loosely and stored in a bin where nothing compresses them.

The artificial tree

Whatever bag it came in has probably failed by now. A large sturdy bin or a purpose-made tree bag is worth it, because a tree stored loose in a loft collects dust and loses branches.

Compress the branches upward before bagging rather than fighting them downward, and note which section is which if it comes apart in pieces.

The one label that matters

Label the box that has the things you want first — the tree stand, the lights for the tree, the star. That box is the one you want on the top of the stack.

Everything else can be numbered. The general rule against descriptive labels holds here too: "decorations 3" is a name that stays true, and a photo of the open box tells you the rest.

Take a photograph of the finished room

This is the highest-value trick in the whole category and it takes five seconds. Before you take everything down, photograph each room decorated.

Next year, instead of reconstructing your own decisions from memory, you look at the photograph. It also tells you what you actually used, which is the basis for the next section.

Throw away what you did not put up

Every household accumulates decorations it no longer uses. The moment to deal with it is while packing away, when you know exactly what stayed in the box.

Anything that did not go up this year, and did not go up last year, is not going up. Donate it in January when charity shops are quiet, rather than storing it for another eleven months.

Where the boxes go

Decorations are the definitive seasonal category, which means they belong at the back of the storage — but reachable, once a year, without unloading everything in front of them. This is exactly what the walkway in a storage unit is for, and the same logic applies to a loft.

Record what is in each box so that "do we still have the big star" is a question you can answer in July. Waoo Storage does that with a photograph and a scannable label per bin, free for a single location.

The condensed version

• Wind lights onto something rigid, test as you wind, label length and location
• Ornaments in compartments, not loose in padding
• Wreaths flat in a box slightly larger than they are, nothing on top
• Photograph each decorated room before taking it down
• Discard what did not go up, in January
• Number the boxes, photograph the contents, put them where you can reach them once a year