Take Down and Store an Artificial Christmas Tree

Hi you are watching VisiHow. I am Henry, and I'm going to be discussing how to take down an artificial Christmas tree. How to take down, meaning disassemble. Now many of you probably have a real tree, you don't have an artificial tree. Some of you may not have even seen an artificial tree in a home. Generally, they are reserved for places like shopping malls and stores where the tree is not likely to receive enough water or care. However, artificial trees do serve a very useful function and purpose if you are on a budget or you don't have the time or you are in the city or small apartment it is much easier to have an artificial tree.

You can quickly put it together, quickly take it apart, and it doesn't require a huge amount of any care really. If there should be a fire it is not nearly the type of fire hazard that a real tree is. The second concern is allergies. Many people have allergies. Your pets may even have allergies. It depends. There are all types of fungi, bacteria, and things that grow naturally in the wild on pine trees. They are great in the wild, bring them into a house though and it's another story. People can have respiratory issues skin issues, it's unpleasant, and children can get itchy eyes. So you want to make sure that if you are prone to allergies or you do have problems with this, you can think about an artificial tree. Now we are going to need a few things to take this tree apart. I'll step off-camera for a minute to get those, I'll be right back and start the next part of this video.

Okay, things we need, we need the box that our tree came in, in addition to the box, we are going to need some plastic bags. We've got plastic bags stuffed into the box here. Now there is a reason for this. Let me set this down and move the box out of the way for now. We'll need that in a minute. The reason we need the bags is because artificial trees come in sections.

There are two or three different types of trees. One is just a solid tree. Small, you bend it up and bend it down. The second one is sectional. You just clip the sections together. The third type is like this tree. This tree is in separate pieces there are five pieces in total. Each piece has what looks like long coat hanger hooks that hook in. Now later when I want to put this tree back together, next year, next Christmas, I don't want to have to go through here and try to guesstimate which ones are longer or shorter or lay them all out to figure it out. That's just a bit of a process. It's much, much easier for me to take the top pieces put them in one bag. Then section two, those pieces in another bag. Section three in another bag and I can write on it with a marker 'three'. Or, I could just take out the pieces and then you know number three goes in section three, two in section two.

1. 1
   So we're going to start taking this tree apart

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   We are going to take the top part off first. The top is a separate piece so let's get that piece here. We get our head stuck in here, and here we go. Let's get this off. There we go, the top of the Christmas tree taken off.

   

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2. 2
   There we have a tree with no top

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   Now we're going to set this to the side. But just to give you a quick example You just put it between your legs and fold these pieces up. Just like this. Just press them down, and we take our tree box, which is here, and you stuff it in. As you can see I'm going to need a bigger box. But this is the general idea. We'll take care of that later.

   

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3. 3
   Next, we're going to go ahead and take these pieces off

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   So as I mentioned our tree is in five sections. That was the top piece. Each of these sections comes off. As I mentioned each section of the tree and as you can see if we look down here there are several sections down there, five total.

   

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4. 4
   Each section has these little coat-hanger like pieces

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   Now they just pull off. You pull them out one at a time, and then once they are pulled off you've got this little piece. Each of those pieces comes off like that. What we're going to do now, I'm just going to drop these on the floor as I do this, and we’re just going to pull them off. Two pieces off, three, four, oops ... okay well, four and five seem to have a prearranged connection.

   

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5. 5
   Okay, so those pieces are off

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   Now the rest of this doesn't come off it's just one big chunk but each of these, this is piece one and this is piece two, each of these is part of the whole component. Now I'm going to go ahead and show you the next part of this as we put them in the bag. Thanks for your patience while we shift scenes.

   

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6. 6
   Okay, so now we can see we've got the bags down here, we've got these pieces of tree

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   Take out our section's bag and pop that open. Now each piece of the tree can be bent, so you just bend them back up where they came from.

   

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7. 7
   These don't last forever, so you should plan to just throw it away when it doesn't work anymore

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   One piece bent back. Bend back another piece. Okay. Two pieces bent back.

   

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8. 8
   See the difference

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   The nice thing about that is next year when you put the tree back together if you find that there's a spot that's a little more barren or there's not enough space for the tree you just bend one of these out a little more and you've got space.

   

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9. 9
   Now let's build this guy back up here, two more, do be careful you can cut yourself a little bit on this especially as they get older

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   In fact, once it starts to get a little older just go ahead a throw it away. These things are not that expensive. If you paid more than say fifty dollars, for a big artificial tree like this, you probably paid too much.

   

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10. 10
    Now that we have all these lovely pieces here, stick these in our bag

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    Okay, go ahead and tie that shut. There we have an excellent use of an unwanted bag.

    

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11. 11
    Now we can take the rest of the tree apart

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    For the sake of speed and not taking forever by doing one part then the second part and then coming back to the first part and doing the second part again. I am going to take these in sections. I'm going to go from left to right when I lay them on the ground then I know where each piece is. So here we have one, two, three, four, five, six pieces, this is the second section from the tree, going to set those over here.

    

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12. 12
    All right now we have the next set, these are getting progressively longer and there is obviously more on there to be seen, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight

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    See that. So we have eight pieces here as opposed to the last one, it's a little more and we're going to have a little more as we go down the tree as it's more full. So put those over here. That's part two.

    

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13. 13
    Now we can take this piece off

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    So this is for parts one, two and three over here. It's obvious when you look at it, you can see that there are an increasing number of slots as you move down the piece as it does as you get farther down the tree. Plus, this is the one where the top goes.

    

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14. 14
    Now we are down here, these are much bigger pieces, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight

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    Okay, so we only had eight pieces that time. This is section number four. Now we have section number five; the last one.

    

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15. 15
    I'm going to go ahead and pick this up so you can see how big that is

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    See? It's fairly large. Let's put that down.

    

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16. 16
    Okay, one, two, three, four, five, let me go ahead and set these down because they are bigger and harder to work with, six, seven, and eight

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17. 17
    Now we have the bottom section of the tree that holds it up

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    That's very easy to take off you just twist these little screws out. Your tree may be a little different depending. This comes out, and then once you have these screws out just enough this should close up nicely. Repackage everything and the tree is done. Thanks for watching VisiHow. Have a great year, and we'll see you next Christmas.

    

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We bought a half tree on clearance after Christmas, and there are no directions on how to take apart to store?

How do we do it? Fold it/ take the limbs off or store whole?

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