Do you use your dining room table as a drop zone for stuff, instead of a place to eat? If you said yes, check out these easy ways to keep your dining room decluttered!
Our Fall Home Organization & Improvement Challenge is going strong and today we’re focusing on the dining room!
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If you’re anything like me, your dining room only gets used during the holidays and on special occasions!
Then, the rest of the year it’s a prime dumping ground for clutter!
Today we’re going to change all of that!
First, let’s get rid of all the stuff and organize the dining room!
Then we’ll discuss easy ways to keep your dining room decluttered for good!
Use the 6/P Strategy to organize the dining room
I use a 6-step strategy to organize everything in my home!
Each step starts with the letter “P”: Prepare, Purge, Polish, Personalize, Place, and Put back.
Prepare
Bring a trash bag, a cardboard box, and a laundry basket into the dining room.
Purge
Remove all items in the dining room and put them in one of the four categories:
- Trash-discard trash in the trash bag.
- Donate-place any items you wish to donate or sell in the cardboard box.
- Relocate-place any items that need to go into a different room in the laundry basket.
- Replacedetermine what items will say in the dining room and place like items together.
Polish
Use a top-down approach to deep clean the dining room.
Use our printable to check off each cleaning task after you finish it!
Personalize
The room is clean, and now it’s time to put your stamp on it.
Use our printable and ask yourself the following two questions:
How does the space need to function for my specific needs?
How can I make the space more visually appealing?
Place
Now it’s time to place everything back in the dining room!
- Discard the trash bag.
- Take your cardboard box to a donation center of your choice.
- Relocate everything in the laundry hamper to the room it belongs in.
- Place everything back in the dining room in an organized manner.
Put Back
If you want the dining room to stay organized, you must train yourself to put all items back in the place that you designated for them!
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Easy ways to keep your dining room decluttered
1)Make a new household rule
A large flat surface like a dining room table is just begging for people to sit stuff on it!
To keep clutter from building up on the table, make a rule that it has to stay clear.
If mail or paperwork gets dropped on the table, then set up a mail station somewhere else in the house. You can read how to control paper clutter here.
If family members leave purses or backpacks on the table, then set up a drop zone in your laundry room or hallway. You can see how I organize all of our entryways here.
2) Keep a centerpiece on the table
I don’t know about you, but I think looking at a dining room table with lots of clutter is depressing!
On the other hand, looking at a table with a beautiful centerpiece brings me joy!
I like to change my centerpiece each season of the year, but if that’s not your thing, use a neutral centerpiece you can keep out all year.
3)Use furniture with lots of storage
A china cabinet or hutch is the perfect place to store items in a dining room!
If you entertain a lot, I suggest you use a buffet as well.
These don’t have to be expensive pieces of furniture!
You can buy something used or repurpose an old dresser or console and paint it.
define the space
If you have to use the dining room for anything other than dining, it’s very important to define the space.
For instance, if your kids do homework on the table, you can create a space to store school supplies within the dining room.
Perhaps use one drawer of the china cabinet to hold pens, pencils, and a calculator.
They can put the items away when they’re done and you can use the table a couple of hours later to eat on!
How we organized our dining room
I’m excited to share our organized dining room with you!
China Cabinet
First, I’ll show you how I organized the china cabinet!
The top section of our china cabinet holds our china. ironstone, and other white dishes.
We keep our glass serving dishes, pitchers, and vases in the bottom half.
I keep my table runners in this drawer. I only have two, and you can see the other one on the table!
The second drawer stores my napkin holders.
butlers pantry
I am grateful to have a small butler’s pantry in this house.
It’s a great place to store the linens and other items I use on my tables.
I stack placemats on the bottom shelf and the top shelf holds my tablecloths and napkins.
I use Marie Kondo’s method of file folding and I love it.
It’s convenient to be able to see the color and number of each napkin I have.
Folding this way makes it easy to grab the number of napkins I need, without disturbing the others.
The drawers hold serving utensils I only use when we’re entertaining!
I recently organized the top cabinet of the butler’s pantry to store our medicine, if you’d like to see it click here.
I hope we have inspired you to organize your dining room and keep it decluttered!
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Blessings, Donna and Rich
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More home organization Inspiration
- Organize Your Dining Room for Easy Entertaining
- Simple Tips to Get Your Living Room Holiday Ready
- Organize Your Dining Room in Preparation for the Holidays
- Best Ideas to Create an Organized Entryway
- How to Organize Your Kitchen Using Zones
Get The Look
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Hello Donna, I love your tips on Dining Room decluttering and organization! I especially love the tip about keeping a centerpiece on the table, as I’ve found this to be the best deterrent (for me) to keep my dining room clutter free. Otherwise, my table becomes a staging area for new & old decor. Cheers to a great week ahead!
I completely agree Kristy! If I keep a centerpiece on the table I’m not as likely to let stuff pile up there! Glad you enjoyed the post! Have a great week!
Donna, this is such a timely post for me. Our dining room has never been this much of a mess. lol After reading your post I realized I’m not utilizing all the shelving I have in there for dining room related things. Changing that before the Holidays. Thanks!
Hi Maria! I know how easy it is to let clutter take over the dining room! Good luck getting it in order before the holidays!
Such great tips Donna. Your dining room is very pretty. Not having dumping zones is key.
Pinned
Thanks Cindy! I live by the old saying “a place for everything, and everything in it’s place.” Have a wonderful week!
Our dining room is totally the drop zone in our house, these are great tips thank you!!
Hi Tanya! I’m so glad this post was helpful to you! I think the dining room is a problem for a lot of people! Happy Day, Donna
I desperately needed these tips today, Donna! Our dining room table is currently loaded with Amazon boxes, Christmas presents, and ornaments I’m waiting to put on the tree. It’s one of our biggest problem spots so I can’t wait to put these fabulous tips to good use. They couldn’t have come at a better time. Big hugs, CoCo
I know this is such a busy time of the year and it’s so easy to let clutter pile up, especially on a tabletop! I’m glad you enjoyed my tips! I know you’ll have your dining room ready to go for the holidays soon! Blessings, Donna