With just a few weekends to go before the holiday season kicks in, here’s a list of home storage spaces you might want to clean and purge now (especially if you’ll be entertaining or hosting house guests).

– PANTRY. At least once a year, it’s a good idea to sort through stored canned and dried foodstuffs, discarding anything that is past expiration or best-by consumption dates. Finding new homes for pantry foods can free up plenty of space for stowing holiday feast ingredients and keeping food-prep areas as clear as possible.

– FRIDGE AND FREEZER. Holiday feast cleanup is much easier when you have plenty of space for storing leftovers in the fridge and freezer. Here you will also likely find items that are past their safe-to-consume dates. Especially with frozen foods, you might be surprised at how short the safe storage guidelines really are.

– DISH AND FOOD-CONTAINER STORAGE. Chances are, at least a few of your holiday guests will offer to pitch in either with serving or cleaning up the feast; make things easy for them by ensuring that storage spaces for dishes, glasses, platters, serving utensils, silverware, napkins, and so forth are well organized and easy to access. And take a few short minutes now to assess your food-storage container inventory and sort, neatly stack, and discard orphaned lids and containers – doing so now will pay off big time when you are trying to pack up holiday feast leftovers.

– COAT CLOSET/LIVING AREA STORAGE. Picture your beautifully decorated holiday setting strewn with guests’ electronic gadgets, keys, handbags, diaper/baby bags, coats, jackets, shoes, and so forth. Now, go make plenty of storage space available, including empty hooks and hangers, where guests can neatly stow all the stuff they will likely carry with them into your home.

– GUEST BED/BATHROOMS. There is a pretty good chance these seldom-used spaces have not been deep cleaned in quite a while and/or have been used for overflow storage. Knock these cleaning tasks off your list sooner rather than later so you can spend more time in a few weeks focusing on the fun stuff, like decorating and menu planning.

– DECORATION STORAGE. Speaking of holiday decorations, how long has it been since you’ve given your supply a good sort, purge, and dusting? Take out and buff up the items you intend to use this year, and – as with all long-term storage areas in the home – if you haven’t used something in the last year or two, it’s time to think about moving it along.