Organizing Your Home for the Holidays—Part II
.
In the last post, we looked at organizing your mudroom, garage, living/dining room, closets, and basement in time for the holidays. And in today’s post, we’ll take a look at how to make sure your bathrooms and pantry are ready for any holiday part you’ll be hosting.
Bathrooms
Your guests will be spending the second-most amount of time here, so make sure your bathrooms are in tiptop shape.
Mirrors
Create a sense of airy spaciousness in your bathroom with well-placed mirrors, making sure to take into account your bathroom’s size and proportions. Bigger, wide-open bathrooms can make do with one or two large mirrors, placed in key spots to maximize the bathroom’s space. With smaller bathrooms, though, you should be a little more creative with your mirrors, such as using multiple small mirrors in a “broken” design that can capture the look of a larger mirror.
Shower Doors
If you’ve got guests from out of town, or just guests who’ll be staying the night, give them a nice bathroom to get ready in. Choosing shower doors instead of curtains is one of the easiest ways to go, ensuring water stays inside the shower instead of pooling on the mat outside. Choose from a framed swing, framed bypass, framed neoangle with inline, or frameless, depending on your tastes and budget.
But make sure to regularly clean your shower doors so scummy mildew doesn’t build up! With water coming out of the showerhead almost never being pure or distilled water, the minerals will build up over time and leave your clear glass doors translucent or opaque. By far, the easiest way to avoid this is to squeegee the doors after a shower, taking time to spray cleaner on it once a week and scrub any minerals your squeegee may have missed. The better you look after your shower doors and keep them sparkling, the easier it’ll be to clean them each time.
Kitchen
The hive of the house, the kitchen is the most oft-used room. Depending on the scale and level of your holiday party, your guests may or may not be eating in the kitchen, but make sure it looks good all the time.
Pantry
Head into your pantry and take stock of what’s in there. While pantries are, by definition, rooms designed to hold non-perishable goods for a long time, it should be used to hold food items you’re actually going to use and not double as the back room of a grocery store. Is there anything you could give away or donate for the holiday season? Foods you can go through for your holiday party?
Once you’ve done a quick inventory, use an organization system to make sure that all your food items are neatly put away and easy to find. Unless you like eating salmon on crackers, the former should be with other tinned foods, while the latter can go with things like cereals.
Now that your whole house is ready for the holidays, give Harkraft a call to help with that big-project makeover you’ve been eying for 2014. New customers get 25% off their first order, and all customers get a high level of service and skills. And from everyone at Harkraft, have a wonderful holiday season!