Ideas and Solutions

Winter Home Organization Guide

Winter Home Organization Guide

There's a chill in the air...a great time to get ready for the next several months of winter by making your home better organized. December is the perfect time to get started. Here are 6 ideas you can try:

Designate a spot for the kids boots. Winter boots can be a real mess, tracking slushy snow and mud all over the house. Take a cardboard box or some other kind of crate, place it near the door and use the box to store the boots...helping to prevent the kids from traipsing through the halls wearing wet and dirty boots while also making all pairs of boots easy to find.

If you have small children, clip their mittens to their coats. Little kids are always losing their mittens and gloves. Special clips, designed for fastening mittens/gloves to coat sleeves, are sold in just about every department store. You can also use clothes pins for this purpose.

Keep auto winter needs all together in one place. Scrapers, de-icers, a bag of sand or kitty litter for traction...they're all necessities for winter road travel. Place all of these items together in a box and put the box in your car's trunk or on the floor next to the back seat. You'll always know right where to find each item when you need it most.

Hang snow shovels on hooks. Whether in the garage, shed or basement, it's important to always keep shovels close at hand. Hooks do a great job of this, and when you get in the habit of placing your shovel back on its hook after use, you'll avoid the possibility of leaving the shovel outside where it can be buried by the next snowfall.

Rotate your working firewood. If you have a fireplace, you probably enjoy a nice warm fire on cold evenings. And likely, you have a stack of firewood outside. Also store a small stack of ready-to-burn logs inside the house, near the fireplace itself and keep replenishing the stack. This will do two things, it will keep wood readily available and it will also dry out the wood for better burning.

File oil delivery slips immediately. If you get home heating oil delivered to your house, chances are you also get a voucher with each delivery...showing how many gallons were delivered, etc. Establish a dedicated file for these slips so you dont lose them. The slips could be useful if there's a dispute on your bill.