Erin and Chris Saulino have a living room filled with wedding gifts and mail, a dining room filled with holiday decorations and kitchen items, and a kitchen that is overflowing with groceries and dishes. They own two sets of silverware, glasses, mugs, pots and pans, then got a third set of everything from the wedding.
Living Room
Dining Room
Kitchen
With a very small kitchen, all their belongings have ended up piled on the tables and stacked on floors within reach of their two basset hound puppies. Bottom line: They have too much stuff with not enough space for it all. Expert organizer Crystal Sabalaske steps in to change all of that.
She thinks that getting the kitchen in order is at the core of this mission and has come up with simple solutions for the living and dining rooms. Sorting through all of that clutter is the first step.
The Living Room
The coffee table is catchall for unopened mail, forcing the Saulinos to scramble each time they need to find a paycheck or bill.
Six months after the wedding, delicate china and crystal boxes are still piled in stacks just below the staircase.
Sabalaske suggested separating all of the mail into piles to file, bills to pay, and things that need to responded to or done. That tip paid off--the Saulinos found a $100 wedding gift amongst the pile! To eliminate this problem in the future, a wastebasket has placed next to the front door outside for depositing junk mail before it even enters the house.
The coffee table can now be used for its intended purpose, and the living room can actually be used as a gathering place.
The fireplace is no longer dangerously close to being a hazard, and the living space seems to have doubled.
The Dining Room
This area of the home was the simplest to tackle, according to Sabalaske. It just needed to be cleared to make room for a china cabinet.
The dining table, once covered with holiday decorations and kitchen items, now gleams under the soft lighting of the room. All those delicate wedding gifts now reside in the Saulinos' china cabinet, a gift from Chris's parents.
Rather than placing each item from the 10-piece china set into the cabinet, Sabalaske suggests displaying only some of the pieces and placing the others in china protectors, like this one. They come with foam sheets to put between each plate and zip up for dust-free storage in the cabinets beneath the glass case.
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