Vol. 1 - Decluttering the Main Living Floor
Chapter 1: The Dining Room
The dining room in our family home has always been a jewel of a space.The bones of richly dark American Chestnut woodwork, its position towards the southeast and in the center of the house, has always given an intimate, cocoon-like ambience. Being its own separate room (no open floor plans up in here!), we can close it off from the workhorse of the kitchen and the clamor of the family room for an even more intimate and soft, cozy dining experience.
Historically, when we were growing up, the dining room was the easiest target to become a dumping ground. Mail and magazines seemed as though they were part of the decor. As my dad’s dementia progressed, it got worse and worse until you had to wade through the piles in order to walk through the room, even if you wanted to.
Until, that is, our dear, longtime family friend came to visit and started going through the mail piles. She understood the difficulty of wading through a loved one’s overwhelming clutter. Managing both an overwhelming amount of clutter, alongside dealing with your loved one’s rapid decline, is a level of exhaustion far beyond what anyone can bear all at once.
Our friend’s help really was the jumpstart we needed to get the momentum going. Because clutter, especially to that degree, is so overwhelming you just don’t know where to start without someone from the outside coming in to give a helping hand.
Fast forward to when I’m finally able to pick up the baton. By that time, I more or less had an idea of how I was going to tackle processing through it all.
When organizing at such volume, I find it helpful to pile like with like, starting off with big, general categories. We discovered that we had soooo much stock of office supplies around the main living floor. So, I placed it all in the dining room to sort through it all and organize it.
That worked out really well. I continued organizing like with like, sorting down into more distinct categories. Kind of like drilling down and into the minutia. I filled the table - with both leaves in, by the way - with all of it. Pencils - mechanical and graphite. Pens and highlighters. Reams of paper and piles of notebooks. Those plastic envelopes for organizing papers. File folders and file labels. Rulers. Millions of paperclips and butterfly clips. Did I mention the post-it notes?
Sorting it all was actually quite cathartic. I approached it this way because I wanted to see just how much my dad had collected over the years. Turns out, it’s enough to last a lifetime (except that not all of it is cute or girly, so there’s going to be more trips to the office supply store!).
Once I had worked through sorting everything into ever more detailed categories, the next step was to figure out where to store it all. In the grand scheme of things, that was pretty easy peasy.
And, no, I did not throw it all out. We are a family that keeps things. My super power is that I just happen to keep them organized and labeled.
We had two rolling carts of narrow drawers that I filled with many of the supplies. This was wonderful because each of the drawers could hold a different category of supply and labeled accordingly. Now, this system isn’t perfect because the labels are inside the drawer, so you do have to open drawers until you find what you’re looking for. Also, these drawers currently live in the dining room, which isn’t ideal to me but I’m making it work for now. I felt that labels on the outside would be too much visual clutter for me with what I wanted to accomplish for the overall feeling in the room. The drawers are a dark stain, fit nicely in the corner and, strangely, kind of fade into the background. White labels on the outside would draw way too much attention to them and the function they serve.
For items that did not fit into these chests-of-drawers, I packed them away in plastic bins and stored them in the upstairs Groffice. Oh, what’s a “Groffice,” you ask? Well, it’s the Guest Bedroom/ Office. We’ll get to that room, friends!
Seeing the transformation from piles of paperwork and mail on the table, boxes of more paperwork and mail around the perimeter to a lot less of each was simply inspirational. I gaze into that room now and just bask in the enjoyment of a dining room that’s continually beautiful to look at.
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The final push to clear out every last remnant was thanks to my aunt coming for a visit and to make a traditional Passover meal. That meant we’d have company in the house and we’d eat the meal in the dining room, rather than the family room table. I worked hard to push through to a standard I could live with.
And, friends, I was proud! I had such a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. I even had a sense of wonder and amazement because we’d never seen the dining room that clutter-free before. Or, I’d never seen it that way before. I felt such a sense of deep contentment that I could give that to my mom and that I kept my word to my dad that I’d take care of it for him.
I bet you didn’t know how raw and vulnerable sharing about decluttering your family home could be.
Our dining room now is that true jewel of our home. The morning sunlight streams in softly and you have to catch it at just the right time. It’s glorious when you do. Our heirloom painting looks as though it was commissioned specifically for the space. My little Home Goods oil painting in an ornate, gilded frame, equally looks as though it was inspired just for that corner. The french doors to the family room provide just the right amount of separation and privacy. And when the door to the kitchen is closed, there isn’t a clutter pile hiding behind it.
Stay tuned for the next installment of how I’m decluttering my family home!
