Along the Dining Room Wall

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.