hey it's abby and today i wanted to giveyou a little tour of our organized dining room. our dining room gets a lotof use around this time of year with all the holidays coming up so i thought itwould be the perfect time to kind of straighten it up a little bit, work onsome of our systems, and i'm excited to show you what we came up with.now i reorganized this space using only items that we had around our house so itcost me a grand total of zero dollars which is an added bonus. before we take a look be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a video and head to abbyorganizes.com/bonus and get our free bonus for our newsletter subscribers.
so this is our dining room. we actuallyhave two different storage pieces in this space. we have my hutch that used to be my grandmother's that i painted a couple years ago and we have thissideboard buffet type thing that actually used to be my boys dresser andi gave it a little makeover to make it a storage piece for our dining room. bothof these pieces have a little display area that makes it pretty but then alsosome hidden storage that makes it really functional as well. i mainly wanted touse the sideboard to store all of our table linens so the drawers are perfectfor that. let's take a look inside each one. so thetop drawer holds all of our cloth
napkins which are just stacked by color.we don't use these very often on a day-to-day basis. they're just more forspecial occasions so we only have a few different colors in here to choose from.so the second drawer holds all of our table runners and placemats. usually when i decorate for a special occasion or for a certain season i will keep it prettyneutral with the tablecloth but then add some color or pattern using a runner soi have all of those in here. i folded them using the filing method which ishowed in another video i'll link to that in the notes and it makes it reallyeasy to see them because they're all kind of lined up i can pull out the onei need really easily. we also have this
set of placemats that i will usesometimes at christmas time and i folded those using the filing method as welland i had these little wooden boxes already in my stash that i grabbed andthey were the perfect size to hold all of our little placematsright in a row. so the next drawer down holds our tablecloths. like i mentioned ialways keep it pretty neutral so we only have two.i didn't need to file them because i can see them both right in there and then ialso keep a couple pot holders in here that i can put on the table if we havesomething hot that we need to put down right on them. there's obviously someextra room in this drawer which is always
fine. we have room to grow if i decide toget more tablecloths, if there's something else i need to store in here.extra space is never a bad thing. finally the bottom drawer is kind of thekid-friendly drawer. they have these pretty plates that are plastic so they can use them for special occasions and they lookbeautiful but they're really kid-friendlyand i also keep this fun little tablecloth in here. it looks like afootball field. the kids get a kick out of it and it's vinyl so they can make amess and i can easily wipe it down i'll put it out for some of our gamessometimes and it's a really easy
tablecloth to use for parties as well. ialso have a couple of open shelves in this space which help with storage butthey are also a lot for decoration as well. open shelves are a great place tostore any collections you have so anytime you have a couple of the sametype of thing you can store them together and they look pretty and it'sorganized as well so i have some cake stands on the top row and then somepitchers down below. so that's everything i keep in this piece. let's head over andsee what's all in the hutch. so one of my favorite things to do with the hutch isto decorate the shelves for each season so they are definitely more decorativethan they are organizational for sure
but i do use the bottom part for storagespace so let's take a look. so in the drawer i have a bunch of different typesof pads that you use to put like on the bottom of chairs or tables so that theydon't scratch the wood floors so i found a desk drawer organizer that i haveextra upstairs and i brought it down and i could organize them by type using theslots in the organizer. i also had some round placemats that were too deep tofit into the sideboard so they're taking up the other half of the drawer. so westore our everyday dishes in the kitchen but down here are dishes that i use wheni'm decorating our hutch or the shelves in our living room or a tray orsomething like that. so i went through
and tried to really whittle down to thepieces that i actually use and love and find myself reaching for all the timeand the ones that i didn't i got rid of. if they were broken or something i wouldthrow them out or if they were in good shape i would donate them. i have severalmugs that i use mostly for decorations so i corralled those in those two littlebaskets that i already had. i got those at crate & barrel i think like ten years ago and they're still going strong we've used them allaround our house and i just used a little adhesive bookplate on the front to put a label on it i actually got a new label maker that ireally love and it prints in cursive and
all sorts of fun fonts so if you want meto do a video about that leave me a note in the comments and i can tell you moreabout it. having the mugs in the baskets makes it really easy for me to just pullthem out grab the ones i need and put the basket back into the hutch. thebottom shelves then just holds dishes there are bowls on this side and i'veused some of the bowls to store some napkin rings as well and then some moreplates and coasters and our butter dish are all on the other side so everythingis really easy to grab it's not cluttered and it's just the things thati love and use all the time. so that's our organized dining room. it'spretty simple. we don't keep a ton of
stuff in here but it makes it reallyeasy to find exactly what we need especially for having a lot of guestsover around the holidays. so let me know in the comments what types of things youstore in your dining room and how you keep them organized!