The Hodgepodge Room

It’s no surprise that ever sense we bought the house I’ve been getting more into interior design and decorating.  I spend a lot of time reading amazing blogs like Young House Love and Design Sponge and have tried to take their creativity, cleanliness and organization into my own home.

This is not a post about one of those successes.

We have a small house, but no matter how big your house is there’s always at least one room that turns into the “dump room.”  As in “I’m going to dump everything here that I don’t know what to do with”… and the guest room is ours.

Our guest room is a plethora of hodge podge.  It serves as a home office for Tim, a place for our guests to sleep, a place to store our excess junk that doesn’t have a home, and somewhere for me to craft and do my projects.

Right now though, it’s none of those things – and I have no idea how to fix it.  Though we don’t like to admit it, Tim and I are a little bit of sentimental hoarders.  On top of that, I have a pretty intense “collection” streak that I try to keep to a minimum.  So besides having two functions (office and guest room) in a small space, the hodge podge room also has to compete with all our junk and random sentimental items that we don’t want in the rest of the house.

Seriously, what do you do with a room like this?  It’s not like I can dump all the stuff in storage… the storage shed is full to the brim and we pretty much decided it’s too hot to bother re-organizing it until the daily high temperature is closer to 80 degrees instead of 104.

I think the easy solution is “get rid of the stuff you don’t use and organize,” but that’s easier said than done.  Like I said – sentimental hoarder and collector.  I look around this room and see stuff like this..

Oh, carousel horses from my childhood given to me by my grandmother.  I love my grandmother.  I love horses.  Must… keep… pretty musical carousel horses.  – puts on shelf to deal with at a later time –

Springer Spaniels?  I LOVE SPRINGER SPANIELS!  You can’t have enough Springer Spaniel stuffed animals… or figurines because they all look like Eliot and I love my Eliot.  Maybe if I put all the Springer Spaniel figurines and stuff on the same shelf it won’t look crazy… yes, that’s the solution.  Definitely doesn’t give off the crazy dog lady vibe at all.

 

That crumpled white mess of fabric?  Yeah, that’s my wedding dress.  My beautiful wedding dress… no idea where to put it.  And who doesn’t need a collection of small crystal animals?  Oui.

I’m really giving it my best effort in the next few weeks to organize all this crap, and make my guest room a nice livable space for both us and our guests!