Declutter Your Dining Room - Declutter Lesson 13 !

Welcome to Declutter Your Dining Room – Declutter Lesson 13!

The dining room was designed as a room for eating your food, back in the day when kitchens were only used to cook and NOT eat in. Depending on the size and age of the house, the dining room is normally located adjacent to the kitchen. In recent years, new builds / redevelopments often don’t have dining rooms and the dining room is being replaced by one large living room / diner OR being replaced by the even more popular kitchen / diner.

In the recent past, if a dining room does it exist, its generally only used for Sunday lunches or special occasions, if used at all. The good news is, there is a resurgence in popularity due to the recognition that there is a need for quality family eating space away from the distraction of TV’s and therefore home owners are keen to start using their Dining Rooms again for the purpose they were designed for.

Think of the luxury of using a bespoke eating room, that is easy to access and a space, where you and your family are able to eat breakfast, lunch and/or dinner and catch up on your quality time?

This is why it’s important to ensure that if you have a dining room, it’s decluttered and decorated / furnished nicely so you will be encouraged to use it and be able to claw back some valuable family time together.

So where to start? How to declutter your dining room?

Here we go: Declutter Your Dining Room – Declutter Lesson 13:

Remove furniture you don’t like.

In my experience, dining rooms can become a hot spot to house random pieces of old furniture that have been inherited, or it contains old fashioned sideboards which house the family china.

All these things need to be dealt with before you can consider organising your dining room.

My advice, is to first of all analyse the pieces of furniture in the room. What don’t you like? With the furniture you don’t like, first of all, empty their contents onto the dining room table, or in a corner of the room. If you have LOTS of stuff, dump into the “dumping ground” (dg).

The furniture you don’t like then needs to be removed. Don’t ever keep furniture in your home out of an obligation because it was inherited. If you don’t like it, remove it.

However, you need to exercise caution! If it’s an antique, valuable or it’s a classic piece of furniture you may want to keep for the future then you need to have a strategy.

As always, common sense prevails here. If you believe it’s valuable then it’s definitely getting it valued or storing it safely for future. In this instance, remove item from the dining room and get it valued immediately or store it immediately.

If it was an heirloom that’s not worth much, that you don’t like, then in the first instance you may wish to ask another member of your family if they wish to have it?

Regardless, items of furniture you don’t want need to be dealt with first and quickly. Ideally move them into another room (or garage if not valuable) whilst you wait for Valuations or for them to be picked up by E-Bay buyers etc.

Those items that are going to the tip or to charity need to be dealt with immediately.

Remember options for unwanted items are:

Sell (you may want to upcycle to make more money).
Tip
Charity
Give Away

Remove contents you don’t like.

The next stage is to root out all your belongings that you don’t want like china, cutlery, ornaments and anything else living in your dining room. You’ve already emptied the contents from the furniture, now assess them and divide into the two piles: Keep and Not Keep.

Split the not keep items into the normal piles:

Sell (you may want to upcycle to make more money).
Tip
Charity
Give Away

Take the not keep items and deal with them instantly. You know the drill.

Remove furniture / Pull out

As per the living room declutter this is only a suggestion. If you have the ability to remove all the furniture (you want to keep) into another room temporarily, I advise you do it because starting from a clean canvas normally safeguards against filling the room with clutter again. Plus, it gives you more inspiration. But if you can’t remove the furniture don’t worry, try and pull out as much furniture as you can so you can thoroughly clean under and behind.

At this point, if you can take down curtains and put them in dg to be sent to the dry cleaners then do so.

You may want to do the same with your rugs.

Clean

Roll up your sleeves and give your dining room a big clean.

Include windows, window frames, skirting boards, lights, inside furniture, behind furniture, underneath furniture, mirrors, picture frames. Everywhere.

Obviously, also clean the furniture.

Polish inside cabinets, take the sofa cushions off and thoroughly hoover the sofa and polish mirrors etc.

Go into the dg and clean all your belongings you’re keeping.

Analysis of space

Now your dining room is clean and tidy, look around and now analyse if you would like to rearrange furniture? It sometimes helps to draw out scenarios on a piece of paper. If you’ve got the energy, have a play around. Move furniture around and see what you like.

Finalise where you would like your furniture to be placed.

Do you need more furniture? Are you missing the all-important dining room table? Now is the time to buy whatever you may be missing. But remember to measure up properly!!

Also, does the dining room need decorating? Ok you don’t have to decorate right now (be great if you did though!!) but this is the time to sit back and get inspired. Wall paper works wonderfully in a dining room btw!!

The put back

Firstly, place your furniture back.

Then go into the dg and start to place your belongings back into the dining room, cleaning your belongings as you do. It’s normal to not put everything back at this stage btw. After a declutter and big clean, you may change your mind as to what is appropriate to place back.

As you place items back, as per the analysis of space above, play around with where you put things. Don’t automatically put things back in the same place as before.

I hope this helped you.

If you liked: Declutter Your Dining Room – Declutter Lesson 13, then look below for other guided declutters in the series.

Gemma

“Out of clutter find simplicity.” – Albert Einstein