In this blog Lou will give you her top tips for storage, gifting and repurposing to reduce the overwhelm but retain the memories.
Louise Muratori is a Lancashire-based Professional Organiser and member of APDO
Over time I’m sure your children have proudly presented you with many items they’ve carefully made at nursery or pre-school.
And if you’re a crafty mum you will have spent hours of messy fun with paint, glue, sparkly stuff, empty loo rolls, paper plates, pasta… or even ended up with huge drawings or paintings to treasure!
So, the question is how do you treasure those masterpieces and keep from being overwhelmed by the piles of paper and toilet roll creations?
The last thing you want to do is throw them away. Some of them are sentimental.
They show moments in time and jumps in development, like the first time they wrote their name or drew a circle. Trivial things to most people but treasured memories for you. You want to remember them forever! Not to mention show them to the kids when they get older, so they can relive happy memories of their own.
Storage Ideas:
A3 display books
For the larger pieces, you can get hold of A3 display books, these come with plastic wallets to slide the artwork into that keep them from degrading over time.
Memory boxes of your favourite items
There are some lovely boxes from independent retailers or recycle an old shoe box or gift box. These will keep your treasures from getting dusty or destroyed.
Don’t have the storage space?
Gift to friends and family
Before you do this, first go through their favourites to see what they’d like to keep. These can be revisited in a few months when more recent pieces have joined the collection!
While you do this you can sort into piles of pieces they’d like to keep and piles they would like to gift to relatives.
This is a wonderful thing to do if grandparents aren’t close by.
Display them
For those treasured pieces, you can frame them and create a display in the playroom or your child’s bedroom.
Create photobooks
Another great tip if space is a problem is to take a photograph of each item and create a photobook. This preserves the memory but uses much less space.
It also allows you to create photobooks for different time periods so you can keep track of when they were created.
Take photos and store them in the cloud
This one is a little riskier, but the cloud is a safe and secure place to keep memories. Instead of putting the photos into a photobook, you can store them in a dated folder on a cloud-based filing system such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox.
Helping my clients declutter their children’s artwork is one of my favourite jobs. Watching people’s faces light up as they remember and relive the memories is beautiful. It’s even more rewarding to take away the overwhelm when they suddenly clear the space and don’t have the guilt of throwing it away.
If you need help with decluttering your child’s artwork or toy space, please book a call with me and we can have a no-obligation chat about what you need support with.
You can find out more about Louise and her work on her: