As I mentioned
here in my last post, I wanted to tidy up and make my dining room look better. I had planned to just:
- straighten our built-in corner cabinets
I did this. I reorganized each and every shelf in both of the cabinets (total of 8 shelves) and now anyone who wants something from one of the shelves can easily figure out where to get it from and best of all, can also easily figure out where to put it back. Before, there were a few shelves with mixed items and some of the things stored on the shelves were actually split up and stored in multiple spots. That was not working for me. The way it is reorganized now though, definitely works better for me and for the rest of the family.
- straighten the armoire where I keep extra storage containers
Not only did I straighten the armoire, but I removed EVERY item from within it and then with Hubby's help, we moved it to the kitchen into a spot where I thought it would look better (which it does). It also happens to be the same spot where I wanted the armoire when we first moved into the house, but it was placed in the dining room instead and I have dealt with it being in there for quite some time. I'm very happy that it has relocated. It is now cleared out, happy in it's new home and filled with different items from the kitchen. The items that were in it were either moved into one of the corner cabinets in the dining room or moved to a new location within the armoire itself. Yay!
- straighten the little kids' table (where the little kids eat when we have company)
For this job, I really just cleared it off and put miscellaneous items back where they actually belong. Things like the iron back in our closet, the table top ironing board back onto the rod of our bedroom closet, some plastic grocery bags thrown away and some dishes put into the sink. I still need to wipe down the table and bring in the chairs that belong with it, but it's a definite improvement over what it was.
I did this and also put on a fall table cloth that Cephas (I believe it was him - although it might have been Koren, I can't quite remember) picked out about a month ago. It has an array of pumpkins in all different fall colors on it. Not my first choice (I was leaning towards the leaf print at the store) but it still looks quite nice on our table.
- straighten the few items that are regularly kept on the floor of this room (the dog dishes and the extra dog food)
I put the tote of extra dog food under the little kids' table because that is an area where it fit and where it doesn't take up floor real estate. Love it! I also moved the dogs' dishes away from a vent. Now, it's in front of one of the corner cabinets, but it's on that we don't use very often at all and the dog dishes are easy enough to move when I would need to get into that cabinet.
Did NOT get this done, but got some other stuff done, which I will mention in a moment.
Ditto for this.
Done and...
done. Don't really think that there is too much detail needed for these items.
Some other things that we did to this room was to move the older boys' computer desk into the room. Now, I know that it may sound weird, but the boys didn't even have the computer hooked up nor sitting on the desk. It's taking up room in their bedroom and they don't use it. I need a space to put all of my important papers and other things. I now have my Girl Scout Leader stuff stored neatly on the desk as well as the boys' Cub Scout activity book which they use to earn their belt loops and pins. These are all stored on the main part of the desk where you would put a monitor. I also have a file tote stored on the lower half of the desk (where the tower and printer would go if it were to be used as a computer desk) as well as a box with my coupon inserts in it that still need to be organized.
Hubby and I also got to talking about some major renovations that we want to do to this room and even put up a swatch of a paint option on the wall to see if we liked the color (we didn't) so now we are semi-committed to changing the color of the top half of the room relatively soon to get rid of that paint swatch. The top part of the room is a dark tan color. The swatch is a red tone, which is a MAJOR difference, as I am guessing you would guess. We decided to go with a burgundy tone on the top half of the room and we are still deciding what we want to do with the chair rail and the wainscotting. Right now, we are torn between just freshening up the white paint that is currently there, changing the color to a wheat color or even removing the wainscotting and the chair rail and making the room a solid color. We're just not quite sure yet.
Oh - and all told, it probably took about an hour to do what I had wanted to do and more! And now, I have a jump start on the kitchen work that I wanted to accomplish too! Yay!
Tomorrow will prove to be a very busy day. We will get the kitchen stuff started and the laundry all sorted and folded and put away or into a pile for the consignment store and hopefully we will also get our bedroom rearranged. Hubby started to do it as a surprise to me while I was working on this post but it will be a big job and one that will require two people to work on.
