Declutter 2015: The Dining Room

Challenge: I am tasking myself with going through my entire house and getting rid of everything that we don’t need anymore. I’m also taking this opportunity to repair things that are broken, eliminate annoyances, develop new systems, and just streamline as much as possible. I’m going to tackle one area/room at a time and won’t move on until that spot is completely done. See more posts in the series >>

On a casual glance, our dining room really didn’t appear to be cluttered. Sure, I always have some transitional junk on the table. I have a problem with keeping flat surfaces clear, as most people do, I think. But the table was the least of my worries. I knew there was junk behind closed doors just waiting for me.

This room had two culprits: the buffet and the wardrobe.

The buffet

I had been holding onto a ton of candles. A whole box full. and with small children, there’s really no candle burning going on around here. I saved a few as “emergency” supplies (like for a power outage/zombie apocalypse), but many of them are now gone. Paper napkins went to my party supply box to live with other paper party goods. A few random pieces of china went in a storage box with the rest of the set. A bundle of new dish towels I had been hoarding finally went into rotation. Also gone: some napkins and napkin rings (we have enough), an ugly vase, and random other things.

I was going to get rid of those fabric placemats because we just don’t use them, but then I realized they would work as pads between all of my platters. A much neater situation than the sloppy folded up tablecloth/flour sack towel method I was using before. All the Seussian stacking of odd-sized dishes used to give me anxiety. I was always afraid something was going to break. But now with the placemats between everything, it feels a lot less precarious.

The wardrobe

Some people have a craft closet or a desk or a secretary; this wardrobe serves that same purpose in our house. Art supplies, stationery, paperwork. That’s the kind of stuff that’s in here. This wardrobe was among the most cluttered places in the house, and for one reason: kids art supplies.

Right away, I was able to throw away dried up Play Doh, dead markers, and other used-up art supplies. That part was easy. I also found a Valentine’s Day craft that we started in 2014… whoops. We finished it up for this Valentine’s Day.

The next step was giving this space somewhat of a function change. Elise needs to be able to access her supplies by herself, so we moved all of them to lower shelves. I also decided to move the printer to the office just to consolidate my business operations. I do more printing of postage labels than anything else. It belongs in the office. And that freed up a whole shelf!

Also, my “filing system” (term used loosely) was not working at all. I had a letter tray for “to be filed” items, but they never ever made it to the filing cabinet in the office. Maybe like once a year. So after filing the back log of papers, I bought a plastic file folder storage box. It’s pretty much the size of a standard file cabinet drawer and barely fits onto the shelf, but I already know this system is going to work so much better.

I brought up a few of the folders from the filing cabinet in the basement, and my plan is just to add them to the storage box slowly. When we get something to file, I’ll grab the necessary folder from the file cabinet, purge any unneeded papers, and then put it in the file box. Nothing sounds as dreadful as spending an entire evening purging and organizing a complete filing cabinet. One folder at a time? That I can do.

Unexpected find: I found two rolls of undeveloped film I took with my Holga a few years ago. I also found two unexposed rolls. So I did something silly and took the Holga on our trip to Disney World to shoot the other two rolls. The film expired in 2011, so I am not even sure what I’m going to get back. But I just dropped all four rolls in the mail to be developed. Surprises await!

I also blew through all the Instax film I had because it was also expired. I should probably post some of those photos because I really love the way they turned out. I should also probably stop letting film expire.