This week we are organizing the dining room!

Like our other rooms in this challenge, we will be doing an overall organization and then diving deeper into a particular aspect of this room. With the dining room, many people find they don’t really use this room very often. Our deep-dive part of the challenge gives you two fun options to honor and get more use out of your dining room.

Decluttering and Organizing The Dining Room

• First, gather four bins and label them keep, donate, trash, other room

• Next, you will start sorting. Go through everything in drawers, buffest, cabinets, and anything on the table. Sort these items into the bins you have labeled. Try to get rid of as much as you can as you sort. Remember, you want to purge as much as possible, you don’t want to spend time sorting and organizing clutter.

• At this point, your dining room should be mostly empty except for the furniture. Take this time to wipe down all of your surfaces and vacuum or sweep your floors. Don’t forget your baseboards, mirrors, and windows.

• Finally, you are going to organize your dining room. Head to your sorted bins and put these things where they need to go. Don’t leave the donate bin sitting by the door! Put it into your car, and as soon as you finish up this week’s challenge, drive it to the donation spot. If you cannot do that right now, head to your calendar and schedule a date to do it as soon as your schedule allows. Now, put everything that belongs in your dining room back into the buffet drawers, cabinets, and other areas.

Now, let’s look at our two options for our deep dive part of the 2020 organizing challenge, where we are going to look at some ways to use your dining room more or repurpose it!

Deep Dive Option 1: How To Use Your Dining Room More

Many of us only use our dining room on special occasions or holidays. If you think of how many times you use it a year, it really is astonishing how underused this space is in your home.

If you want to keep your dining room as a dining room, consider using it for more than just holidays that come once a year.

• To get more use out of your dining room, why not consider hosting special brunches or dinner parties once a month? These do not need to be fancy (of course, they can be if you like); it’s more about inviting people to share a mindful afternoon or evening together with you in your home.

• You can also make it a plan that your family eats in the dining room all together one night a week. Cook something special or a family favorite on these nights and put out your beautiful tableware for your family to enjoy.

You’ll be surprised how doing these things will breathe new life into your dining room and make it feel like a part of your home.

Deep Dive Option 2: Repurposing Your Dining Room

Now, if you really don’t think you will use your dining room, or are very short on space for a purpose that you would love to have room for in your house, you may want to repurpose this space. Here are a few ideas you can use to repurpose your dining room.

• Turn it into a home office – Maybe you have always wanted a home office but don’t have an extra room to make it happen. If you are really not going to use your dining room, why not make your home office. Your productivity will thank you.

• Turn it into a no-screen living room – You may already have a family room where everyone watches T.V., but what about creating a casual, cozy sitting room that has no screens? It can be a place to relax, a place to read, or even a place for kids to focus on homework.

• Turn it into a library – Have you always dreamed of having an in-home library? Repurposing an unused dining room into a library is a fantastic way to breathe new life into this space. Having a library in your home entices everyone to read more and gives them the perfect place to browse books, add to the library, read, and share stories about their favorite books.

• Turn it into a playroom or homeschool room – If you have younger kids, turning your underused dining room into a playroom or homeschool room could be the perfect project for you.

So Much Potential

I bet you didn’t realize how much potential your dining room had! By giving this space a little time and attention I think you will see some really great benefits and uses for this room in your home for your whole family.

Before you go, don’t forget to download your printable. Share your before and after pictures with the #

Want more dining room inspiration? Check out these reader favorites:

Bringing Feng Shui to Your Dining Room
Our New Home Tour

New post Organizing The Dining Room – Home Organizing Challenge on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas

This week we are organizing the formal living room.

Now, while this room might not have a ton of clutter in it, there are still some things you can do that will make this room even more beautiful and make you want to use it more.

Most formal spaces are already neat as a pin. We don’t live in those rooms; sometimes, we don’t even enter them. We tend to hide our chaos and clutter in the back of the house in places most guests don’t see.

That’s fine. But, we are on this mission to organize our homes, and taking a day for this room is still extremely useful. After we tidy up in here, we will head into our deep dive, where we are going to talk more about how we can make this room feel more special.

Declutter and Clean

• If there is any clutter, tackle that. Remove anything that doesn’t belong in this room and put it where it belongs.

• Wipe or dust all of the surfaces. Clean your windows. If you have drapes, curtains, or blinds in your formal room, see if they need to be cleaned.

• Vacuum and/or sweep the floors.

To keep this space decluttered and organized, take a day each week to do a quick run through with these tasks:

• remove unnecessary items
• wipe surfaces
• sweep and/or vacuum the floors

If you add this to your routine, your formal living room will always be guest-ready!

Deep Dive: Adding Special Touches

Now that everything is neat and tidy, we are going to do something a little different in our deep dive this week.

Sticking to the same space, the formal living room, we are now going to move from cleaning and organizing to thinking about what we might want this room to look like or be used for but haven’t taken the time to take action.

Take a look around your formal living room. What have you always wanted to do to this room?

Maybe you have been itching to move some furniture around but just haven’t taken the time to try it out. Take the time now to try the sofa on another wall. Take the time to hang up that picture finally. Or take the time to order new curtains or a unique area rug.

Do whatever it is that you have been putting off that will make this formal living room feel like the unique space it is intended to be.

So much of our lives is disorganized because we are always on the go and do not take time to do the little things that make our houses into homes.

The next thing you know, the little things have piled up into one massive BIG thing that seems nearly impossible to tackle! I now grant you the time today to tend to the little things that you have been putting off.

What are you going to do with it? I’d love to hear about the things really get you excited about your home, share them in the comments!

After you grab the free printable each day, don’t forget to share your process and progress on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter with the hashtag #apochallenge

New post Organizing The Formal Living Room – Home Organizing Challenge on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas

This week we are organizing the family room.

We are in the fifth week of the 2020 organizing challenge. How are you feeling so far? So far we have talked about how to prepare for an organizing challenge and organize your kitchen and your pantry.

If you are just joining the challenge, each week we are organizing a specific room in your home on a larger scale, and then breaking down an area within each space as well- a kind of macro and micro organizing as we go along.

Organizing The Family Room

This is one of those rooms we really live in. Suffice to say it is also one of the places that can become cluttered and messy very fast if everything does not have a designated home.

Rooms that get a lot of use tend to attract things from all other areas of the house because we bring those things with us as we all come together and assemble in these well-loved and live in spaces in our homes.

Today we’ll look at how to declutter and organize your family room, as we’ll dive deeper into how to keep the rooms you are working so hard on, organized. Let’s do this!

• Get four tubs or boxes and label them with the “Toss,” “Donate,” “Keep,” and “Relocate” cards you downloaded when you signed up for the Challenge.
  “Keep” is for items that will stay in this room, and “Relocate” is for things that need to go somewhere else in the house.
  Starting in a corner, work your way around the room. Clear off the top of each horizontal surface and empty out every drawer. Put the items in the appropriate bins.

• Be strict with yourself about what you keep.
  Do you really need your collection of magazines from 1990? Do you need VHS tapes from when your now tween and children were babies? No, you do not. Donate these items where they will be better used. With today’s modern technology and streaming services like Netflix, you can probably watch most of the movies in your collection at no additional charge.
  Why not donate them all? Imagine all that extra space.

• Games are another challenge for the family room. If you can find all the pieces, then make space in a cabinet so your family can easily access the fun. If you are missing too many pieces to make it work, get rid of it. Who wants to play Yahtzee with only 3 die?

• Make sure you clean, dust, wipe, whatever before you replace the Keep items. This includes the back of the electronics, the top of the picture frames, everything. You’ll thank me when you’re done.

• Pick up any mess your family has made in the last 24 hours. Run the vacuum in your clean new family room, straighten a pillow or two, or stand back and admire how amazing it looks.

Diving Deeper: Keeping It Organized

Now, we are going to look at a few ways you can keep your family room organized. You’ve done all the hard work, now make sure you can enjoy that pay off for a long time.

Why not reward yourself for your determination and do a little shopping? Your plan is to stay organized, right?

Here are a few things you may want to pick up to keep your family room organized.

• Head to a Super Store, an office supply store, or your favorite storage specialty store and have some fun. Buy a label maker. These useful little things may seem a little Type-A, but Type-A is good in your new, organized home.

• The process of discretely labeling boxes and other containers can help you and family members remember what is in them, and make it easier and faster to replace that item properly.

Family rooms can get messy because of toys and games. These things definitely get used in the family room. Finding beautiful storage to keep them out of sight, but close at hand, is vital to keep this space organized.

Here are some great items that do double duty as storage and room decor or furniture.

1. Storage ottomans and benches

These are wonderful for storing toys or games and also add extra seating to your room.

2. Bookshelves as room dividers

Add places to store your books. Also, add bookshelves or cubbies to hold smaller items while creating extra space in a larger family room by using it as a room divider.

3. Baskets that can easily slide under tables

Baskets are always useful, and the choices are endless when it comes to finding beautiful baskets. Be sure to measure the area you want to add baskets before making a purchase.

While you are shopping for organizing items, you can also investigate beautiful storage tubs, pretty file folders, and unique baskets. They do not have to be expensive to be effective.

Wrapping it up

Now that you have your family room decluttered and organized enjoy your new space by hosting a game night or a family movie night. Take the time to appreciate how beautiful and cozy everything is now that you are finished with this part of the organizing challenge.

While you are organizing share your before and after photos with our community with #apochallenge

Before you go, don’t forget to subscribe to the challenge, so you don’t miss a post! If you know a friend who would love to do the 2020 organizing challenge with you, please share it with them!

Want more inspiration to organize your family room? Check out these reader favorites:

Creating a decluttering strategy

Declutter Your Home: 10 Things To Throw Out Right Now

How To Create A Cleaning Routine

New post Organizing The Family Room – Home Organizing Challenge on A Personal Organizer by Helena Alkhas