Kick the Clutter: Decluttering the Living Room

So one of my resolutions this year is to get organized. Kick the Clutter is a weekly series I’ve started so that we can all get organized together! Who’s with me?

We’ll go step-by-step around the house until we’ve reached every nook and cranny and there’s nothing left to straighten up, donate or give away.

Kick the Clutter: Get Rid of Living Room Clutter

Our living room has gone through so many transformations in the five years we’ve been here, that I’ve lost count. They haven’t been big changes… just changing around the furniture placement. Quite a bit of furniture moving around here.

But finally? I think we have a winner.

Dig in and ditch the clutter

Toys: For the past year, we’ve had two bookcases in the corner of the living room, where we kept many of the kids’ toys. The only problem was that the pile of toys always seemed to grow and consequently, would take over the rest of the living space. It got to be pretty overwhelming. So we compromised and moved most of their toys into our office area. It’s now mostly a playroom, with a small “work corner” for the computer. There’s still a small bin in the living room for a few toys.

Media: For as long as we’ve been married, we’ve had a large armoire that kept our TV hidden from the world. It’s a nice piece of furniture and has well served its purpose for our family, but it’s very big and heavy. It overpowered the room. We recently bought our very first TV (we’ve been incredibly lucky with hand-me-downs from family.) With that change, we decided to take a leap and mount the TV on our wall so that we could downsize that armoire.

For the first time ever, we’ll have two TVs in the house. We’re planning to move the armoire and older TV down to our unfinished basement to keep me company on the treadmill.

And now it feels like our once overcrowded living room has almost doubled in size.

Furniture: Is the furniture in your living room adding to the cluttered feel? How about moving a piece out or placing it in a different spot that might help give you some visual breathing room. As I mentioned above, we’ve experimented quite a bit with the furniture placement in our house and the living room is no exception.

But I think we’ve finally hit the perfect placement — and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve honestly never had this feeling about our living room before, but now I just can sit on the couch, look up and think to myself how much I love it here. That’s such a neat feeling, to fall back in love with our house. (And so much cheaper than moving! )

The “before” photo:

I’ve been looking for a “before” look at our living room, which is tough to find, since we were too quick to start decluttering (i.e. I forgot to take a before photo!). So please look past the cute Puppet on a Stick. See all that clutter in the background? That’s our living room on a typical day. Toys strewn about in the corner. And that big black bar in the front is the armoire that I told you was overpowering our room.

Here’s another clearer photo of what our living room-turned-playroom looked like.

We had already moved the bookcase/toy storage out at this point, but this was a very typical look at that corner of our living room – yes, including the dog hair!

And the “after”…

Goodbye, toys!

After one too many bumps and bruises for the kids, we traded my favorite wood coffee table for a softer storage ottoman. Bonus: blankets and trains now live hidden inside.

Now *this* is what we see from the couch. What a difference!

By the way, the toys haven’t completely disappeared.

Here’s our secret:

This leather-ish storage ottoman from Target – for $80 (and actually on sale this week for $59!), it holds a good number of toys. The rest have moved into the same room as our computer/office or to the kids’ rooms.

And we still have something to work on, namely my magazine addiction, especially with all the freebie subscriptions I’ve found in the past year. We are quite literally overflowing with magazines here. At some point, though, even if they’re free, it doesn’t help if they’re taking over. So on my to-do list as I continue to declutter is to cancel half my subscriptions.

Still some decluttering work to do here.

Next week, we’ll move to the office/playroom (I think).

Let’s keep track of our progress and share with others! It’s always easier when I get to hear what ideas are working for others. So please share your thoughts and progress with us throughout this series!

Tagged as: kick the clutter, organization