The festive season is almost upon us, indeed a quick jaunt around your local high street and you’d probably be forgiven for thinking it was Christmas Day next week. I’m afraid us retailers are always good and early at getting organised for Christmas but are you ready for the family and perhaps also a few unexpected guests descending on your space during the Christmas holidays?

Here’s our 5 minute guide to getting your home neat and organised for Christmas:

Deck the Halls…

…with shoe racks and overdoor hooks.

cost effective shoe storage at just £12

There’s nothing worse than tripping over piles of shoes to get to the front door. Invest in  an inexpensive extendable shoe rack to temporarily store guests shoes and when they’ve finally gone (let’s hope it’s before the New Year!) you can pop it under the stairs or in the bottom of your wardrobe…no-one can have too much shoe storage.

Likewise a cost effective over the door hook is an ideal place to store guest’s coats and scarves if your hallway coat hook is already bulging with the family’s winter coats. It looks neater than hanging a huge pile of coats over the banister or even worse the sofa and can be removed in the New Year when your pad is returned to an oasis of calm and organisation.

Clear the Clutter when Company Calls

Picture the scene, it’s Boxing Day afternoon, several dozen of the kids new toys are carpeting the lounge floor, there’s extended Christmas TV guides and weighty Sunday newspapers all over the sofa and probably a box of chocolates that you want to keep to yourself and not offer to the unexpected guest who’s about to ring the door bell!

Lidded storage cubes make for a great clutter swallower when company calls and are great to use as temporary storage for toys, magazines etc.  Keep one close to hand for extra storage and whilst we don’t advocate the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality, if you’re after an instant clutter clearer then our faux leather or pandan storage cubes are ideal. Better still they make for attractive side-tables to rest all those additional glasses of wine, cups of tea and turkey sandwiches you’re about to make.

Guest’s Glad Rags

Your guests are going to need somewhere to hang their clothes in the spare room and if like many guest bedrooms we’ve seen, you’ve crammed the place to the gunnels with your own clothes then we think we have the answer. Forget garment rails and canvas wardrobes, you can even forget our fabulous elfa wardrobe internals, unless you’ve got the room they’ll just clutter the place-up even more. Instead opt for an over the door (no screws required) valet rail. Capable of holding a couple of suits, party dresses and other clothes from the weekend suitcase, this simple temporary solution is going to give you what you want (extra wardrobe storage space) without the hassle.

Great for guest bedrooms, our over door valet rail in a brushed silver finish is just £20

Bathroom Bliss

At only £10 this corner shelf makes for a great bathroom storage solution

If you’ve invited company for the festive season, chances are your bathroom is going end-up covered in lotions, potions, travel wash-bags and get really cluttered. The age old solution to a cluttered bathroom is to simply pile all the shampoos on the side of the bath but this tends to look messy and is not ideal when you’ve got guests.

Instead opt for a simple clutter-clearer like our Mesa Bath Organiser. Granted, it’s not the prettiest storage solution in our range but it will help keep your bathroom looking a wee bit tidier. Better still, this clever bathroom caddy is simply affixed with suckers so is quickly removed when life is returned to normal after 1^st January.

Kitchen Nightmares

Too many cooks, too much booze and not enough worktop space. A common question asked by STORE customers is just how they can regain more kitchen work surface and clear the clutter. It’s an even bigger problem at Christmas with generous portions of extra food and bottles of plonk all over the place.

Simple storage solutions work best in the kitchen and the key is to think vertically.  Try stacking shelves inside cupboards to free-up additional space for extra tined food or plate storage.  You’re also going to be generating a lot more recycling with all those sweetie wrappers and gift wrapping paper, so go for a set of stacking recycle bins with a small footprint rather than a huge metal recycling bin.

It may sound bizarre but our range of bathroom storage caddies are ideal to stick to kitchen tiles for storing spices, salt and pepper etc. and keep the work surfaces clutter free

Finally, why not invest in a small additional wine rack to pop in a porch, garage or under the stairs for all those extra bottles that’ll be sunk over the festive period.

Oh, and it’s around 15-20 minutes per pound for cooking the turkey or around 45-50 minutes per kilo in modern money.

Have an organised Christmas!

STORE's toy storage boxes in July's Your Home Magazine

For other toy storage boxes why not checkout our new LEGO shaped toy storage boxes or for a more traditional look our wicker Pirates Treasure Chest Toy Box.

If you’re after something a little more mobile, Your Home magazine suggested using our Clutter Busting Bins in last month’s issue. They make for a great toy store to plonk toys in and wheel away out of sight when company calls OR of course there’s our original Toy Storage Unit at £29 with it’s wooden frame and removable buckets for storing smaller toys.

Our new range of LEGO brick plastic storage boxes are not just for small kids storage needs!

I’m delighted with these great photos of our new LEGO brick plastic storage boxes but I can’t help thinking they look a bit surreal as I’m not use to seeing LEGO bricks at this sort of scale. I’m really pleased that we also managed to get a photo of the boxes under the bed.  When we first saw these stacking LEGO storage boxes with thought they’d be great for children’s toy storage but they actually make great underbed storage boxes for big kids too!

Our new range of LEGO plastic storage boxes will be available in STORE from mid July 2010…it’ll be worth the wait, they’re the best looking children’s toy storage boxes we’ve seen in years!

Recyclable Plastic Storage Boxes

If you haven’t spotted our new range of plastic Nick Nack storage boxes yet they went onto our STORE shelves a few days ago. These neat little plastic boxes have a bigger story to tell than perhaps is offered at first sight. Apart from being a great little storage box for all those trinkets and bits & bobs that always seem to clutter-up your drawers, they’re actually made from the world’s first 100% biodegradable plastic. Each storage box is manufactured from a combination of polymer and corn starch which when disposed of in compost or soil will TOTALLY biodegrade in 6 – 9 months. Still not convinced? Here’s the science bit:

To create our new plastic storage boxes, naturally occurring bacteria are fed sugar that is obtained from corn starch. The bugs digest the sugar and store the resulting PHBV polymer much as the human body would store fat. The “fat” is then extracted and becomes an injection mouldable polymer called poly-3-hydroxy butyrate-co-valerate…a derivative of the molecule that Forbes magazine declared “one of the five molecules that will change the world.”…and guess what, it was first developed right here in Blighty in the late 1980s

LEGO Storage Brick Boxes on tour in New York

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a range of new storage product in…oooh….it must be weeks!  Due into STORE HQ next month as part of our summer 2010 range is a new assortment of LEGO storage boxes, ideal for toy storage.

These neat new LEGO brick storage boxes are giant versions of the classic clip-together LEGO bricks and will be available at STORE in LEGO’s traditional 1970’s colour scheme of red, blue, green and yellow plus we’ve asked our manufacturer to produce a pink LEGO storage brick for little girls.

Stack 'em to create more storage space

Offering a fun way to encourage kids to tidy-up after themselves, just like real LEGO the storage brick boxes can also be stacked on top of each other to create cool LEGO structures. Hmmmm…vertical storage, our professional decluterring friends at APDO would be proud of us…..we’re always being told that vertical storage offers a great solution to creating additional room in small spaces.

Also in the new LEGO storage brick range and I can’t yet decided whether I find these fun or freaky(!) is a giant version of the iconic yellow LEGO man head. Unlike the much smaller original, our LEGO man head is 27cm high (that’s human head size) and opens up to reveal storage space inside.  Just like the LEGO storage brick boxes, the giant LEGO man storage head can also be neatly fixed onto another storage brick and removed when required.

I’m really excited to see my first giant LEGO storage brick box and I’m wondering whether there’s going to be applications past toy storage.  At 50cm long the largest brick would make for a great CD / DVD storage box for big kids or how about stacking them and storing newspapers and magazines inside for a striking feature in the living room?

The LEGO Storage Brick Boxes range is availble in STORE from late May 2010

STORE got several mentions throughout and we’re very pleased to be rated as the place to go for clever storage solutions.

Ray Mears visited the Canadian Pacific coast in his BBC2 show Northern Wilderness this Sunday evening and even had time to make some storage boxes during his trip.  Ray was invited to try his hand at a traditional Canadian technique to make a cedar lidded storage box from a single piece of wood.

Ray Mears prepairs for a game of squash

The amazing technique involved taking a single plank of cedar and chiselling out a channel where each corner of the storage box will eventually be, but at the same time leaving a thin slither of wood at each corner intact. The plank is then gently steamed for several hours and this thin skin of wood becomes pliable and can be bent into a right angle to form the corners of the storage box. When dry the malleable steamed cedar becomes very had and forms a very sturdy and beautiful storage box which is graced with traditional eagle, fish and wool symbols.

In search of some decent trashy TV, I also settled down in front of STORE Distribution Manger Julie’s favourite ITV2 show Gossip Girl this week. Sad and mad as I am about clever use of space for decent storage I was delighted to see that Gossip girl’s Patrick Roberts had a walk-in wardrobe full of our lovely wooden elfa decor shelving or perhaps in the vernacular of Gossip Girl herself I should say:
“Spotted! STORE’s very own elfa decor shelving gracing the walk-in wardrobe of bad boy Patrick Roberts, XOXO”

Followers of fashion may have spotted our handmade wooden storage boxes in Grazia recently. We’re very proud of our lovely birch wood storage boxes that are made from a single piece of birch that has been steamed and bent to form the cube. We’re also very proud that we were featured in Grazia’s busy London Fashion Week edition too.