7-Day Plan: Get a Spotless, Beautifully Organized Dining Room

Make a Plan of Attack

The current state of your dining room will determine how much time you’ll need to tackle each part of this plan — read over the whole plan first and then decide where to focus your efforts. If, for example, you have little clutter but a huge collection of tarnished silver you really want to get clean, you may want to start right in on the cleaning on Day 1. No matter what you focus on, it helps to get started on a weekend, when you can knock out the biggest tasks while your energy and motivation are high. Then finish up during smaller pockets of time during the week.

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Day 2: Deep Clean

Cleaning tasks: At first glance the dining room may seem like a straightforward room to get spic and span. But if you have a china cabinet filled with tableware, drawers of silver and open shelving with tons of decorations gathering dust, it can be quite time consuming.

• Start with a top-to-bottom vacuuming of the entire room. Reach up to the highest corners and use an attachment on the window treatments. Get some help if you can to move the dining table to the side, so you can vacuum the top of the area rug and underneath it.
• Roll up the area rug if you have one and mop the floor. Allow the floor to dry completely before replacing the rug.
• Use an all-purpose cleaner and a microfiber cloth to clean the baseboards, windowsills and cabinet hardware.
• Clean your dining table and use a wood polish if it’s appropriate for the finish.
• Use glass cleaner on mirrors and glass cabinet doors.
• Dust open shelves, cabinet interiors and china or decorations that have been sitting out.
• If you have fine silver and it is tarnished, take the plunge and clean it. If you don’t want to use a toxic silver cleaner, try soaking your silver several pieces at a time in a pan lined with aluminum foil and filled with boiled water and baking soda.
Decluttering tasks: As you deep clean today, think about what you might be ready to let go of or store elsewhere. Tomorrow you will be making some decisions to help simplify your space, but if you’ve already given the matter some thought, the process will go more smoothly.

Day 4: Organize

Decluttering tasks: By today your dining room should be cleaner and much less cluttered. Bravo! Now it’s time to take it a step further. The work you do today will make things easier to find and help prevent clutter from building up in the future.

• Make a place for your favorite everyday pieces. Those napkins, placemats and serving pieces you find yourself reaching for most often should be placed front and center.
• If you have limited space, transfer rarely used items to a storage closet elsewhere in the house. You can always get them out when you need them — it’s more important to have room for the things you use and love on a daily basis.

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• Sort your drawers and cupboards by category: placemats in one, napkins and napkin rings in another, serving implements in a third and so on.

Before you call it quits today, dig out that list you made on Day 1 cataloging the kinds of things that were cluttering up your dining room. What is on your list? Kids’ homework, magazines, laundry? Look at each item and do a little digging to figure out why these items end up in the dining room. For some things, like homework, it might make sense to create a permanent home in the dining room where the kids can store their things. For others, like laundry, the problem could be you don’t have a convenient place to sort and fold clothes in the laundry room itself … but that’s another 7-day plan!

Day 5: Enhance Lighting

Decluttering tasks: How well lit is your dining room? If your overhead light is not yet on a dimmer switch, look into getting one — it makes a world of difference. Enhance an overhead light with one or two lamps placed on a buffet or console table, or a whole bunch of candles.

Cleaning tasks: Unless you tackled it on the big Day 2 deep clean, now is the time to get all of the grime off that beautiful dining room light fixture. And while I admit I have been known to stand on our dining table, the safest thing is to use a sturdy ladder.

• For fabric-covered shades, use a vacuum attachment to gently remove dust.
  
• For glass and crystal fixtures, use a dusting wand or soft cloth.
  
• For flush-mount light fixtures, remove the cover from the ceiling and gently clean it inside and out with a damp cloth.