living room cure: the landing strip

Landing Strip: we’re doing some exterior renovations, can you tell?

Confession: We’re getting a little bit behind with our living room cure. Umm, the dog ate my homework? Actually there’s work being done near our house which caused our internet to be down for over three days last week, which put me behind on pretty much everything.

So we’re not quite where we’d like to be by this point but I don’t think it will take me too long to catch up.  Week three of our living room cure has us looking at our landing strip, the area just inside the main door to our home and the first spot where clutter collects. By organizing the things that end up in this area and filtering the items that may just cause clutter in the rest of our home (ie junk mail) we can quickly make an impact on the “stuff” that hangs around our house taking up space.

Here’s a quick list of what’s in our entryway and what we can do to better coral it:

• coats – these will stay on the hooks that we have in this space, but out of season items should be moved to the closet.
• reusable shopping bags – the ones that we use often will stay on their hook, the remaining can be relegated to the closet.
• shoes – again, out of season footwear will need to be moved to the closet. We also need a new doormat that better suits the room, it needs to be a bizarro size because of the shape of the space (45″x53″) so we’ll need to find out how to custom cut something to fit there or find someone that can do it for us, suggestions please!  It would also be good if we could find space for a boot mat for use in the winter.
• bench – this will likely be moved to another room and replaced with a small dresser that will hold hats, mitts, pocket change, and the like.  It will also serve as a surface for outgoing packages and library books.
• Kitty’s dishes – I think these may have to stay in this area because it adjoins the kitchen and is really the only available floor space.
• potato box – we’re going to try keeping a handful of potatoes and onions in our fridge and moving the potato box to the basement where it will hold our stockpile.
• Darren’s backpack – we’ll designate a space on the floor for it or install a special hook.
• flyers + junk mail – I’m going on the hunt for a “no junk mail” sign which should pretty much take care of these, anyone know where to get one?
• mail – will be sorted at the door with garbage to be put straight into the recycle bin in the kitchen.  Keep-able mail will likely either end up on the dresser that we’ll be adding or on the dining room table, there’s not much so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Some of my favourite landing strips

{favourite landing strip images: 1. all about eve 2 + 3. apartment therapy}

You can see that I like simple and minimal, unfortunately I don’t think that’s practical for us.

As far as our living room goes here’s our list of proposed changes:

• rework the “entertainment” area so there is more closed storage
• unpack the records from their boxes
• give away one or two more of our plants
• move existing floor lamp so it provides more usable light
• clean out the get rid of the bookcase
• hang larger pieces of artwork above the couch and create a plan for an art wall
• new curtains (possibly white lace? we need something with a bit of privacy but also lets light in) and rods for the three small windows
• incorporate Darren’s guitar into the room

Do you have any suggestions for our landing strip or living room?  If so, share them here.