Corners of My Home

“When in doubt, pile it in the bedroom.”

Isn’t that everyone’s idea of organization?  It’s not?  What are you saying exactly?  That maybe that’s the reason just one corner of our bedroom looked like this…

Lovely.

An extra end table piled with books and children’s winter clothes.

And isn’t the window just a vision with it’s white mini blinds?

With a little love, the corner now looks like this:
The extra end table is gone, the books are put away, the winter clothes either went into the giving-away box or were packed away for cooler days.  I left only the books and magazines that I’m currently reading on the bottom shelf.  I moved the diaper pails (one for dipes, one for covers) into the space, which cleared up a different corner of the room.

And behold!

Curtains!

Wait till you see what’s crammed into the rest of the room!  But as I always say, that’s a post for another time.

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I’ve been quiet lately because I’ve been working on this:

It’s one of the corners of our “office” which is really just one end of our living room. I started working on the office area a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn’t really seeing any progress. Then I realized that I was trying to tackle the whole area at once instead of sticking to small sections at a time. So I focused on this one area near the piano. Believe or not, my poor daughter is trying to learn to play the piano. I say trying because she can’t really get at it to practice. Yes, I felt very badly about it.

In my defense, though, this little corner didn’t always look like that. This is the only “before” picture I have and it’s really more of a work-in-progress picture. This is the one corner I forgot to take a picture of before I got started! So what you are seeing is the whole purge-sort-reorganize process in action.

I started with the bookshelf which is where I keep most of our currently in use school books. The picture shows it after the purge. Take my word for it that it was a mess. Actually, don’t take my word for it. Most of what you see on the floor was on the shelves or in the cabinet. I pulled out everything we are no longer using and sorted it into piles on the floor.

Next I pulled out everything from the corner between the piano and bookshelf. It was piled about as high as the piano with all sorts of junk. A lot of it went out in the trash.

Our office was always a problem area. I’ve mentioned that we don’t have a real desk to work at or to store things in and that creates a lot of clutter. This area was also the hardest hit during our flood. A lot of the stuff in the area was moved quickly to other areas of the house or tossed into plastic bins. Then we moved and it was all boxed up as is. Not the best circumstances to try to unpack in.

So here is the after picture.

Everything was redistributed around the house, thrown out or tagged to put in to storage. My school shelves are now organized by topic and by child. I put a basket in front of the cabinet doors to prevent 22 month old Bip from opening the doors. The basket has surplus school supplies like handwriting paper, coloring sheets, colored paper, folders and sheet protectors. And Pumpkin Girl can now get to the piano to practice! The piano itself needs more work, but that’s a post for another day.

In case you missed it, you can see the other areas of my home that I have uncluttered here: Corners of My Home. Hopefully I’ve inspired someone to tackle their own clutter and create a more peaceful home.

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Here’s a look at my buffet table before I cleaned it up. Again with the Lots of Stuff That Doesn’t Belong theme.

Look! There’s even more stuff hiding behind the clock.

This was an easy fix this time. I cleared off the whole buffet table and started over. Everything was dusted before it was put back, lots of stuff got put away. Something I have noticed is that if you have an area that looks cluttered, other people (and you know who you are!) just add to it because they “don’t know where to put things.” Argh! Stop helping already!!

So here is the buffet table the way it looks today:

S-w-e-e-t !

I think it’s time to move on to another room. I’m eyeing the area known as the computer room. It’s really just one end of our living room, but no matter what you call it, it needs help.

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This little corner of my house has been giving me a lot of trouble. The dining room is directly off the front entrance and this wall is the first thing you see. We use these little shelves to corral our shoes, but it has become a collecting point for just about everything.

Among the other things that don’t belong here are two magazine holders, school supplies and an accordion in that big brown case.

This area took longer to fix than I thought it would. I think the main problem is that all this stuff landed up here because it had no other place to be. Recently there was a discussion on the Sonlight Forums about organizing. One of the members is a professional organizer and she listed some of her key things to work on. The first one was that everything in your house should have a place to live. Every single thing. This is not a new concept, of course. But for some reason it really sunk in this time. Looking around me, especially at our dining room table and this little space, I realized that we have too many things that don’t have a place to live. So they end up at the nearest horizontal surface. So for this space, I really needed to find a place for all this stuff to live. Not just anywhere, either! It needed to be somewhere that made sense and that wouldn’t add to the clutter somewhere else.

To help accomplish that, we brought down an under-used Longaberger baker’s rack from the guest room. I have matching magazine baskets for it that I designated for mail, one for Philip, one for me. The bottom shelf holds Boo and Pumpkin Girl’s school binders and a box of math manipulatives. We do all of our school seatwork at the dining room table, so this is the best place for those things. I put the bakers rack into a corner of the dining room that I’ve already cleaned up. Not the most attractive, but our home is tragically small and we have to consider function over form most of the time.

I found an unused space in the back of my nifty walk-in pantry for the accordion. I’m still working on all the papers that were just stuck into the blue container, but it’s getting there. The 2 cardboard boxes have been emptied and their contents discarded or distributed around the house. So this is what we have now:

I found a Longaberger basket that wasn’t doing anything (gasp!) and put it on top of the shoe shelves. It holds our library books which never had a home and tended to get moved from place to place around the house. Having the basket on top of the shelves also helps to keep the shelves clutter free.

I think the next Corner of My Home that I will work on will also be in the dining room. I know you’re probably thinking,” Dang girl, how much stuff can one tiny room hold?!” I’m here to tell you, more than you think. The dining room used to be one of my favorite rooms in the house and I would like very much to reclaim it.

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For this week I’ll share with you my computer table. Actually it’s a computer cabinet, but because of the way the wire and cables have to be run out the front, the doors never close.

Before:

Lots of papers jammed in around the moniter. Not one, but 2 scented candles sitting there. One of the speakers is buried in the back. Lots of stuff that doesn’t even belong here. Now, in our defense, we don’t have any other kind of desk to work on. It’s either the pull out shelf in the computer cabinet or the dining room table. So there are lots of things here that don’t have a proper office home.

After:

Much better! Everything not plugged in got pulled out of the main area. All the papers are gone – trashed or filed. When that happened, the other speaker revealed itself. I added a little tin can with a flag motif for pens and pencils. The top shelf only needed a little straightening up. Only a few things up there didn’t belong.

This little area of the house has been bugging me for awhile. It didn’t take much effort really. Most of my time went to taking care of all the paper stuffed in there. Now, when our internet connection goes down as it does once a month, I won’t be so embarressed when the Comcast guy needs to check the computer.

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For my first Cluttered Corner of My Home, I picked a fairly easy one. This is a corner of my dining room:

Doesn’t everyone store extra TVs on their dining room floor? And isn’t that the loveliest flooring you’ve ever seen?

This little space took me about a week, but it was a very busy week and I wasn’t able to work on it every day. My husband was very helpful and would even volunteer to get that corner done. I couldn’t have done it without his help and motivation.

So here it is now:

Same lovely walls and floor, but the mess is gone! The cuckoo clock was in one of the boxes stored here, so we hung it up and got it going again. We made a huge effort not to just move things around but to actually put them away. Wow, what a concept! In doing so, we needed to make room for that little TV and as a result, a totally different corner got cleaned up, too.

Just one less eyesore in our house and hearing our cuckoo clock after 6 months of it being in a box is literally music to our ears!

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