2-Day Plan: Get a Spotless, Beautifully Organized Dining Room
Has your dining room become a catchall for the odds and ends of daily life? Or is it a virtually untouched, dusty museum that you use only on holidays and special occasions? Getting the dining room fresh, clean and well organized is a good first step toward using and enjoying it daily. This weeklong plan will get your dining room in shape, so you can enjoy nightly dinners with your loved ones in a comfortable, serene space. |
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Make a plan of attack: The current state of your dining room will determine how much time you’ll need to tackle each part of this plan — read over the whole plan first and then decide where to focus your efforts. If, for example, you have little clutter but a huge collection of tarnished silver you really want to get clean, you may want to start right in on the cleaning on Day 1. No matter what you focus on, it helps to get started on a weekend, when you can knock out the biggest tasks while your energy and motivation are high. Then finish up during smaller pockets of time during the week.
Day 1: Regain sanity.
Decluttering tasks: Today is the day to make a fresh start in the dining room.
- Remove anything that belongs in another room: shopping bags waiting to be unpacked, library books that need to be returned, kids’ toys, piles of mail, laptops — whatever you’ve got!
- Completely clear the stuff off the dining table, floors and other surfaces. Most decor can stay (for now), but if it has a home in another room, out it goes.
- Instead of just shoveling the piles into another room, take the time to actually put things where they go. Otherwise you will end up back at square one by next weekend!
- As you declutter, make a list of exactly what sorts of things have ended up in your dining room. This is a clue that those types of items do not have a proper place to “live” — later in the week, we will look at this list more closely.
Day 2: Deep clean.
Cleaning tasks: At first glance the dining room may seem like a straightforward room to get spic and span. But if you have a china cabinet filled with tableware, drawers of silver and open shelving with tons of decorations gathering dust, it can be quite time consuming.
- Start with a top-to-bottom vacuuming of the entire room. Reach up to the highest corners and use an attachment on the window treatments. Get some help if you can to move the dining table to the side, so you can vacuum the top of the area rug and underneath it.
- Roll up the area rug if you have one and mop the floor. Allow the floor to dry completely before replacing the rug.
- Use an all-purpose cleaner and a microfiber cloth to clean the baseboards, windowsills and cabinet hardware.
- Clean your dining table and use a wood polish if it’s appropriate for the finish.
- Use glass cleaner on mirrors and glass cabinet doors.
- Dust open shelves, cabinet interiors and china or decorations that have been sitting out.
- If you have fine silver and it is tarnished, take the plunge and clean it. If you don’t want to use a toxic silver cleaner, try soaking your silver several pieces at a time in a pan lined with aluminum foil and filled with boiled water and baking soda.
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