Gift Closet

When the going gets tough, I get organizing.  It’s what I do to zone out and not think about anything else.  It works amazingly well.  The payoff at the end is awesome and it helps me to feel more in control when things around me might not necessarily be so.  I’ve been wanting to tackle my gift closet for awhile because I knew I was going to run out of room to shove things in pretty soon :)

This armoire use to be used as my bedroom closet in my old house.  When we moved into our new home 5 years ago and found ourselves with plenty of closet space in our bedroom, I moved the armoire into my office where there is no closet.  It now serves many functions but the biggest one occurs around the holidays when I need somewhere to stash gifts for family and friends.

This is what it looked like last week:

And now it looks like this:

As you can see I finally had a chance to get everything out of the plastic bags and into some kind of order.

The two white drawers on the bottom shelf hold wrap and tissue paper in one drawer and party supplies in the other.  The other tote beside it holds our warranties and manuals and above that is the tote I use for my occasion cards.  The brown bag on the other side holds all my extra gift bags inside.

The two baskets on the middle shelf hold gifts I’ve found on sale and already purchased.

You’ll notice I’ve added two cardboard boxes to the top shelf.  That’s because those are gifts that need to be mailed away.  As I complete the list of things I need to purchase to send off I can continue to add them to the correct box.  This allows me to keep everything going to one place contained and organized in the meantime.  Then once I mail off those parcels, that will free up space for me to store my own family’s gifts.

How do I keep track of gifts purchased?

I use a simple notebook that I use year after year.  Each year I write the new year at the top of a blank page and then write the names of all the people I will need to buy gifts for including birthdays and Christmas.  As I purchase items I mark what was purchased into my notebook so I have a running list of what was bought and still needs to be bought.  This system has worked well for me for years.  It’s easy to use, I can bring the notebook with me shopping if I need to and it keeps me from buying duplicates as I can easily look to see what I purchased in previous years.  Not only do I not want to rely on this brain of mine to just remember that kind of stuff but by writing it down I am freeing up all kinds of mental clutter.  Awesome!

Hopefully this helps someone with their own gift space.  Even if you don’t have an armoire you can use, maybe you can free up some closet space somewhere else, space under a bed or even the attic to consolidate and organize all your gifts into one place.  If that’s not possible then even getting a big box for a corner of your bedroom will work.  Just make sure to put a big KEEP OUT sign on it :)

Where do you store your holiday gifts?

Coming up soon:  Gift wrap stations