Organizing The Dining Room

There’s nothing like waiting until the very last minute to complete a project, eh?

March is over and so is the March Monthly Organizing Round-Up at I’m An Organizing Junkie. As I’m working my way through my home as well, I thought I’d follow along with her Round-Up as much as possible so today I re-organized my dining room (though I’ve been thinking about what to do for weeks, really.)

The two main problems with my dining room were organizing the space and organizing the crazy power cords – both due to having a computer desk in the corner.

My first priority was to determine if there was any way to reorganize the space and move the desk out of the dining room. I did a little bit of rearranging when I worked on the kitchen, but the desk just shifted to a different corner, which shifted the table out past the end of the dining room wall, which required the table being pushed against the wall so that it didn’t stick into the walkway too far and so that the chair on the end could turn around for the desk also.

My second task, whether I was able to move the desk or not, was to deal with the cord clutter. The router and modem need to be accessible but out of the way where they can’t be bumped or messed with by the kids. So my husband moved them from the top of the computer tower to the top of the microwave which was better for them but bad for cord clutter. Also, the cord for the microwave barely reached the power strip so it couldn’t rest on the ground, which didn’t seem very safe and also allowed the modem to become unplugged occasionally. Not pretty.

I didn’t necessarily follow Laura’s PROCESS, since it wasn’t that kind of an organizing project, but I did spend time thinking over the various options before I began. I named my specific goals and considered how each option would meet those goals.

After moving the desk to the living room, the filing cabinet to the bottom of my closet (there’s a rhyme and reason for that, I promise), and hanging the router and modem on the wall, this is what I have now.

The table is far away enough from both walls we can really get around it! And, hey, I can even get back there to sweep up the kid crumbs, how’s that for novel? Notice that you really can’t see any cords… they follow down the back corner of the microwave cart and then behind the curtain to the plug. Yay!

This is the finished message/work space. I moved the picture-converted-message-board I had above the microwave because I wasn’t using it and replaced it with the calendar from the fridge. My home management binder, phone book, and hole punch are to the left of the microwave.

When I get home I can throw away the junk mail, temporarily stash the mail in the sorter (obviously I need to work on the temporarily part), then later hole punch them and add them to the home management binder for action or file them away in the filing cabinet. During the day I use the top of the microwave to lay open my home management binder and check the chore lists or the bills that are due.

After I finish going through the mail, my last remaining task for the dining room is to make new curtains. One thing I learned/remembered when I made new curtains for the kitchen is that nice curtains can go a long way towards creating the mood of the room. (You know, as opposed to, say, a flat bed sheet.) But that’s not, you know, organinizing… so as far as that goes the dining room is done. Yay!