The holidays are the perfect time to organise your home and prepare yourself for the coming year. Whether you’re working in or outside the house this festive season, these tasks are a fun and productive way to fill your summer days.
Indoors
Do something with your family photos
Now that the year is coming to a close, you can think back and reflect on the memories you’ve made. Perhaps these memories are catalogued in hundreds of photos taken across your smartphone, camera and tablet. Take some time to upload everything to your computer and back it up onto an external hard drive for safe-keeping. Maybe you’d like to organise photos into albums or scrapbooks, or select a few special shots to frame and hang around the house.
Alphabetise your book, movie and music collections
Sure, it’s a small thing, but arranging your books, DVDs and CDs by title is a fun way to fill in time – and it’s makes accessing that next title so much easier.
Organise your office space
Now’s the perfect time to get your affairs in order for the New Year. You know those loose pages that stack up in piles around the house? This is your time to file old invoices, bank statements and records, and discard unnecessary clutter. Throw out dried out pens and kit out your office space with new stationary. If you have a budget, you might want to review it. Or, if you’ve been meaning to set up a budget, you could do that now.
Outdoors
Start up a backyard garden
There’s nothing more satisfying than knowing your fruits, veggies and herbs have come straight to your table from your very own garden. Perhaps you’ve already created a veggie patch or a flower garden, and now the work is about preparing it for the new season.
December and January in Australia are perfect months for planting:
- basil
- beans
- beetroot
- cucumber
- chives
- eggplant
- lettuce
- tomato
- pumpkin
- oregano
- sunflowers
- sweet corn
- watermelon
- zucchini.
Spruce up the yard
Could your yard do with a spruce? Summer time is ideal for general garden maintenance. Take this time to:
- clean out rain gutters
- trim hedges
- pave the area around the clothesline
- oil the outdoor deck
- set up a greenhouse
- build a cubbyhouse for when the grandkids come over.
Get painting
The summer months are also perfect for completing those much-needed painting tasks. Giving the front fence, window frames and front door with a new lick of paint gives your house a fresh look and adds value to your property.
Inside the house, there are items of furniture, such as the desk, side table or cabinet, waiting for a makeover. It’s fun to set yourself the task of sanding down and repainting an old piece of furniture. Working with your hands and seeing the end result is a very satisfying feeling.
What tasks around the house are on your to-do list these holidays?
