We have a rental house right next door to our house, and a new tenant is moving in next month. She's actually our first tenant since we are first time landlords! She's recently divorced, has two kids aged 6 and 8 and she's downsizing. Oh, and her ex-husband lives nearby and is helping her with the move, so it's all good!

One of the reasons she chose our house is because it's closer to her kids' school. As they get older, they'll actually be able to walk to school. Perfect! It will be fun to see them running home, backpacks filled with craft projects, drawings, handmade Mother's Day cards, and, oh yeah, books. At the ages of 6 and 8, they are just at the beginning stages of bringing home lots of school projects. The question is, especially in light of mom downsizing, what do you do with all of those papers, projects, and other treasures for storage? 

Yes, they'll take center stage for a while on the refrigerator or framed on the wall. But more will come, and as you swap the old for the new, you won't have the heart to throw away the old. So I've come up with 10 ways you can keep your child's treasures for years to come.

1. Create a collage in a single large frame and hang on the wall.
2. Use Shutterfly or Snapfish to create household products with images of their treasured artwork.
3. Take photos of their treasures and load a whole bunch of them into a digital frame for display.
4. Once you've created digital keepsakes, store the original works in decorative boxes found at local craft stores. We use the decorative boxes for some of our gift baskets. Take a look: travel gift basket, wedding gift basket.
5. Make a video of your kids showing off their work with detailed explanations of how and why they came up with their creations.
6. Make a collage wall in your home with different shapes, colors and sizes of frames to display their treasures.
7. Fill a large photo album with pages and pages of treasured papers and artwork.
8. Have your children create their own decorative boxes starting with plain plastic or cardboard boxes. They can paint, draw or craft them in any way they choose. Then store their treasures in their own boxes.
9. Add a file cabinet to your children's room where they can file and store their own papers. Teach them how to label the files by month or school year. Have them decorate their own folders in their favorite colors.
10. Use a cubed shelf with baskets or plastic bins to store each year's treasures. Add photos to the front of the bin that correspond to memories of that year.

And if you're also trying to downsize and undecided about what to keep or not, this handy infographic might help.

For more ideas on moving and self storage, visit our friends at MakeSpace.com.

These organization ideas were based on years of organizing and creative design. Any similarity of this post to other published works of professional organizers is completely unintentional.