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Now that we’ve finished eating all the chocolate we possibly can during Halloween, it will soon be time for Thanksgiving! As I drive around my neighborhood, I can’t help but smile with the recent appearance of the pumpkins and gourds on everyone’s door steps as well as beautiful and colorful wreaths.
One of my goals in previous years was to decorate our home for the holidays with the hope that we’d host a few family gatherings every fall. My secondary goal was to figure out a way I could decorate year after year without a huge investment as well as figure out how I could get a process down for it.
After a few dollars down the drain and figuring out what I truly like and need, I’ve got a few practical steps that you can take to make decorating for ANY holiday a breeze by systematizing it without taking the fun out of it!
1. Figure out which areas you would want to ALWAYS decorate for the holidays. This will allow you to understand HOW MUCH decor you need to buy, store, and keep. My areas are: foyer, stove hood, television console, mantel, living room desk, breakfast nook table. Below is an image of my entry foyer that I always decorate for the season:
2. Create a list either by area or by holiday/season of things you need to get. I personally use an app on my phone so that when I’m out shopping, I can quickly look through to see if I can pick up 1 or 2 items to spread the purchases out. It makes me feel less bad about how much I invest in home decor (yes, I said the word invest). This is where I list what I think I want as well as the size of the item for that space.
3. Shop for home decor items at the end of the season for a good deal. In the fall, I normally hunt for summer decor. I usually stock up on fall decor the first week of December. I can usually find some amazing deals on small decor items that I could use the following year. Below, you can see that the items inside of the garden aquarium were purchased at 80% off!
4. Invest in clear plastic tubs. Learn from my mistakes. I invested initially on some grey non-see-through storage boxes, and they were a pain each season as I had to dig through them. You live and you learn.
5. Once you decorate and love how you have it set up, take a picture every year! You never know how big your home decor collection has grown.
6. Get similar toned items so that you can group them together! This image below has products from over 6 different stores. If you stick with a neutral theme for the “bones” of your decor, you can always spice them up with seasonal floral!
7. Think of how you can re-purpose something that you are about to trash. For example, I was going to throw this Thanksgiving wreath away because I got a new one. However, just placing it as a backdrop allowed me to spruce up our foyer with more of a fall feel! If you don’t like something, store it for at least a year. You never know when you are going to “like” something again. Its weird how this works.
8. Use your children’s artwork to decorate for the holidays! Check out my detail tip on that here.
Those are 8 awesome tried and true steps to getting yourself prepared to easily, quickly, and inexpensively prepare for the holidays!
How are you planning on decorating and getting ready to host your holiday gatherings?
