Does This Room Make Me Look Like a Hoarder?

OK, so a lot of the rooms in my condo might make me look like a hoarder. But this room, especially, well, the clutter feels like it's choking me. This is our dining room.

My long-term goal for this room is to add built-in bookshelves and replace the chandelier. I also want a different dining room set.

My short-term goal is to move the bookshelf (which is really a dollhouse) to another room ... move those locker cubbies to the garage ... sell the old TV table (where the lamp is) and replace it with a short, stout dresser (a better place to hide away things like plastic bags than those cubbies).  That chair in the foreground will move once I get the Christmas tree down.

If you notice, though ... I am still just *moving* things around, mostly. And, as the Flylady says, "You can't organize clutter; you can only get rid of it!" Well, at least I'm getting rid of the vintage TV stand.

Anyone want it? I purchased it at Empty the Nest for $15 in 2013.

The dollhouse/bookshelf, well, I just am not emotionally ready to release that, lol. Besides, who would take it? Also, I love it: It was my best curbside find ever!

This dollhouse was always meant to be in the girls' room -- they want it for their Barbies. However, when we moved into our condo in January 2012, we discovered that the dollhouse is too bulky on the bottom to turn the corner into that particular bedroom.

Thus, it has served as a bookshelf in the dining room.

Here are my options, then:


Move the dollhouse into my master suite, the only one of the three bedrooms that it can easily be transported.

Move the dollhouse to the garage for summer play only.

Get rid of it.

Partly disassemble it so that I can then reassemble it in the girls' room. Actually, that's no longer an option, at least not an easy one; because, last summer, I purchased two twin canopy beds that take up pretty much all of the wall space in the girls' small bedroom.


For now, I think I will move the dollhouse into the master suite and turn it around so that the white part is facing me (it's a lot more calming that way, it looks like a piece of art, versus the dollhouse part, which has a hideous unicorn wallpaper border on it).

In terms of the books -- now that this dollhouse will really be a dollhouse -- I am in the midst of a massive book purge. The books I keep, well ... stay tuned.

Here's the motivation for my dining room re-do: I imagine clean, gallery-white walls. A table with at least four chairs (our current table, we only have three b/c one chair broke). A peaceful place to eat and do crafts.

Well, maybe I'll  hang one painting in the room. For now, I'm thinking it will be this one, a treasure I found at Hunt and Gather:

By the way, we do have an eat-in kitchen, but we don't use the eat-in part to eat -- instead, it's our away room -- a  Sarah Susanka term for a room set apart from the noise of the TV in the living room, a kind of retreat to read, study, talk. I like this room a lot, and although it needs some tweaking, I don't want to overhaul it like I do the dining room. Speaking of Susanka, I like the idea of turning my dining room into a sort of library. Ultimately, my vision looks like this.

For now, though, clean and uncluttered will do!