Last week we invited the Tiny Bloggers to share the disaster zone they’ve been living in for the last year. Though we admit we’re not super sympathetic (if they’re sick of the construction, maybe they could try doing some work on their house while we’re at our day jobs), we did think it was only fair for us to do our own disaster confessional like we do from time-to-time.
As you may recall, in the past we’ve confessed such embarrassing things as having holes in our houses, flooding the basement, and things we’ve made that haven’t stood the test of time. Also we pretty much constantly encounter disaster in the day-to-day of our home renovation adventures.
Today we’re confessing some messy situations we have been keeping under wraps. Hope you enjoy seeing the reality of what’s going on in our homes and don’t think less of us…
Naomi — What My Dining Room Usually looks Like
As you know, I am working on finishing up my dining room (thank you for all of the great table advice!). What you may not know is how badly the room needs to be finished, and not just because we have mismatched furniture. We’re severely lacking in storage.
Unless you’re a cool minimalist whose 300 sq foot storage-free apartment is featured on Apartment Therapy, lacking in storage doesn’t mean lacking in possessions. It usually just means that all of your stuff is hanging around in the open as “clutter.”
That is definitely the situation in our dining room. Take the corner where we will eventually have a china cabinet/bar, for example:
Yup, that is what regularly sits right in the corner of the most visible room of my house. We’ve got a green recycling bin filled with Brad’s birdseed, storage for mailing supplies (envelopes, stamps, etc.), storage for extra extension cords (not sure why we need these in the dining room) and the pieces for a board game I am designing. All good stuff, but perhaps not the best use of this space.
We have a similar issue next to the entryway cabinet:
While this has successfully moved the piles of mail away from the dining room table, it is still covered in piles of mail. There are also piles of shoes, piles of newspapers, and piles of random stuff that I intend to give away but haven’t gotten around to taking out of the house yet.
As you can see, this is not the ideal situation. It is definitely a big motivator for the decoration of this room!
Sage — That mysterious “scrap wood stash”
In a number of recent posts I’ve mentioned using scrap wood for projects (like my sliding pantry drawers, which I made entirely out of scrap wood), and I promised that I would eventually reveal my stash — both to prove it’s real, and to show that it’s really messy. Basically I’ve just turned a closet in the basement into scrap wood storage, by which I mean I save every piece of wood I ever have left from a project and then throw it onto the floor of this closet:
It’s spilling out so the sliding door is hard to close, and as you can imagine it’s hard to find what I’m actually looking for in there.
Or rather it was, because this disaster actually has a happy ending! Yes, after one afternoon working on a project, I got so fed up with the mess that I decided to take 45 minutes to organize the darn thing.
I started by cutting a shallow shelf. The closet already had cleats along the closet walls at about the midpoint from a previous shelf that must have been there, so all I had to do was cut down a piece of scrap wood (ha!) to lay across them. I actually used a door that I had been saving ever since I took the doors off the pantry to turn it into open shelving over two years ago. See, hoarding is so convenient! I just cut it to length on my table saw:
Then laid it down across the cleats. With the help of a shelf that had been sitting in storage in the basement (the cool deco one I salvaged from that old high school that one time, which I would love to find another place for eventually but don’t currently have) and a bucket, I got. It. Organized.
Small pieces with small pieces, tall pieces with tall pieces, flat pieces with flat pieces…it all makes sense now. I mean it’s still a basement closet filled with scrap wood, but isn’t it beautiful?
So maybe this makes for a terrible disaster confessional because I actually fixed it, but I can assure you that up until just recently this really was a mess.
As always, we hope you enjoyed us baring our souls to you (yes our souls are our messy dining rooms and basements). Now you tell us: what chaos are you hiding in your homes?
What is it about shoes? And mail.
In the never-ending clutter that is the average American’s home, shoes and mail dominate the scene.
We probably could have colonized Mars by now with the energy that has been devoted to systems for organizing shoes and mail.
Oh my! To have my own scrap wood cupboard!! So envious! I have a scrap wood pile too – it moves around the house depending on what we are working on at the time. Eventually I hope I can move it to one of the cellars (really tiny cellars, but we have two of them at least), but I get too scared of the rare breed of cave dwelling spider that lives down there (true story, those things are huge) so it is possible if I moved it down there it would never get used again ever. But I won’t get rid of my stash – always so useful! In fact my footstool in the living room is an old wardrobe door we ripped out of this house, with bun feet from a flatpack wardrobe that didn’t survive the move up here! 🙂
Thanks for sharing the reality, it makes me feel a whole lot better about my own! x
Oooh, a portable scrap wood pile! 🙂 I’m glad I’m not the only one who won’t throw away the leftovers, and is living with the messy consequences!
Hey! I can help out here. Naomi, that broken snow globe in the corner of the dining room…you can ditch that. Got reimbursed, you can buy a new one or whatever else you desire with the refund. You’re welcome!
Love that you’re in solution mode, Mary Ann 🙂
Maybe I can actually get inspired to do something about my scrap wood, which is messily occupying a long wall in the basement. (My basement closet. is full of paint the previous owners used on the house. Have I touched up any of it? No, but I could!) It’s in the darkest part of the basement, which made sense when I needed to unpack boxes in the best light, but I can’t find any particular piece of scrap.
I can say it was a pretty easy project that felt very satisfying! I say go for it!
Lol! Now I feel so much better about my foyer! It has a very tiny closet. So we put a small secretary desk next to the closet to handle the hats, caps, gloves, sweat bands, device chargers, cameras, dog paraphernalia, ect. Snuggled up to it on one side is the paper shredder with mail and circulars and “to be filed” piles sitting on top of it. To the other side, we have the “to go” box….. as in “This stuff has gotta go!” to Goodwill or wherever and a pair of rain boots, a pair of clogs and the tall, skinny bucket we stash umbrellas, pool cues, walking sticks and the like in.
Nice to know that I’m not the only DIYer tat hasn’t got my entire act together!
You’re definitely not alone, Kim! And our entire car is serving as a “to go” box right now, as we packed up a ton of stuff to donate and now are struggling to find an open donation center. In the meantime we’re just driving around with tons of clothes, linens, and homegoods crammed into the back of our Subaru….