Making Space Ready for Christmas

Making Space Ready for Christmas.  There’s a particular moment every December when the penny drops. The tree is up, there are four bags of presents behind the sofa, the spare room has become a wrapping station, and someone is arriving on the 23rd to sleep in it. Christmas doesn’t just take up time. It takes up floor space, and most houses don’t have any spare.

Making Space Ready for Christmas

The good news is that a bit of planning in November buys you a much calmer December. Here’s how to get your home ready.

Start where the decorations live

For most people that’s the loft, the garage or the cupboard under the stairs – and that’s also where everything else has quietly accumulated since last January. Before you drag the tree down, take an hour to look at what’s sharing the space with it.

You’ll usually find three categories. Things you use seasonally, things you’re keeping for a reason, and things you’ve been stepping around for two years without making a decision. The first two are worth storing properly. The third is worth being honest about.

If the loft is the only place you can put the Christmas boxes, and the loft is full, you don’t have a decorations problem. You have a storage problem wearing a Christmas hat.

Contact Us Today

Ready to solve your storage challenges? Contact NESelfStorage.com now:

📱 WhatsApp/Phone: 0044 776 444 7599
📩 Email: info@neselfstorage.com
📍 Location: North Nelson Industrial Estate, Cramlington, Northumberland

Clear the rooms you actually need

Think about how the house gets used over the holidays rather than how it gets used in October. The spare room becomes a bedroom. The dining room becomes a dining room again. The living room needs space for a tree, and probably for more chairs than usual.

Anything bulky and non-essential – the exercise bike, the flat-packed furniture you haven’t built, boxes of paperwork, the golf clubs – can go into storage for six weeks and come back in January. It’s a small cost for the difference between a house that feels festive and one that feels cramped.

The same goes for furniture you’re moving to make room. A unit gives you somewhere to put the armchair that has to shift for the tree, rather than wedging it into a corner of the bedroom.

Protect what matters

Christmas decorations are unusual in that their sentimental value often far outweighs what they’d cost to replace. The baubles your children made at primary school aren’t insurable, and a crushed box in a damp loft is how they get lost.

A few things help:

• Wrap glass ornaments individually in tissue paper or kitchen roll and pack them in rigid boxes, not carrier bags.
• Use clear plastic tubs with lids rather than cardboard. They stack better, they don’t collapse, and you can see what’s inside without opening six of them.
• Wind lights around a piece of card before packing. Future you will be grateful.
• Label by room, not by year – “hallway garland”, “tree lights” – so unpacking follows the same order as decorating.
• Keep an artificial tree in its original box if you still have it, or a purpose-made tree bag if you don’t.

Lofts and garages are the worst places in the house for temperature swings and damp. A clean, dry storage unit is a much kinder environment for anything you want to still have in ten years.

Somewhere to hide the presents

This one is underrated. If you’ve got curious children, a small storage unit is the only genuinely secure hiding place most families have access to. It’s also useful if you shop the Black Friday sales and need to keep six weeks of purchases out of sight, or if you’re storing a bike that simply will not fit in a wardrobe.

Choose a unit with access hours that suit you, so a late-night collection on Christmas Eve is actually possible.

If you run a business

December is the busiest trading month of the year for most retailers, and stock has to live somewhere. A short-term unit gives you room for seasonal inventory without committing to a longer lease, and it keeps your home or shop floor workable. Market traders, online sellers and hospitality businesses all tend to need extra space from late October onwards.

And then there’s January

The other half of the problem. New gifts arrive, the tree comes down, and suddenly the house has more in it than it did in November.

It’s worth deciding in advance what leaves as the new things arrive. If the children have new toys, some of the old ones can go – to charity, to storage, or to someone else’s children. If you’ve been given kitchen equipment, something in the cupboard can move on. Making that decision in December, when you’re already sorting, is far easier than making it in a cold week in January.

Ready when you are

Whether you need a small unit for six weeks or something larger for the long term, we can help you work out the right size and get you moved in quickly. Get in touch and we’ll talk you through the options – before the boxes come down from the loft.