Why do you call it the dining room?

Since we moved into our new house eighteen months ago, our dining room has been a dining room in name only. Because our living room is quite large, we opted to devote half of it to serve as a dining area, and made the dining room a storage area. I should point out that we needed to do this because our 90-year-old home, while beautiful, was in need of extensive work to undo the ghastly interior decorating (I use the term loosely) choices that the previous owners had made. Therefore, we found ourselves with only three serviceable rooms out of seven, not counting the bathrooms and the basement.

So, the dining room has housed such miscellanea as unboxed books (we ran out of boxes), my telescope, our guitars, most of our office contents, some bookshelves, and, ironically, our old dining room set. On several occassions I've reorganized it, to the point where it was a serviceable storage area and the objects we actually used were easily accessible. It was not until this weekend, though, that I found the time to tackle it properly.

With my wife in bed from a bad case of bronchitis, and my daughter otherwise occupied (OK, I admit it, she was watching cartoons), I repacked almost the entire contents of the dining room into Grand and Toy boxes. This took me eight hours, but fortunately, thanks to my combined daycare/work/real-life schedule, I find myself up before 6:00 am these days and I was done by 2:30 in the afternoon. That left me some time to, with my remaining energy, start schlepping the boxes upstairs to my wife's future office, which was already home to about thirty other boxes, along with our desks and old beds and mattresses. I made some more progress on this task today, and with any luck, by next weekend our dining room will be ready for a coat of paint followed by -- gasp!! -- dining!

Fair Play

In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I'm writing tonight about an organization project that my wife -- yes, my wife, who is usually the antithesis of organized -- has completed in our daughter's room.

Our daughter, who is two, has an ominous collection of toys and clothes that would give the most experienced organizer pause. My wife conquered the problem with the application of eight 3-drawer clear plastic storage towers that I bought from Canadian Tire for $20 apiece.

At a total of $160, this gives us several times the storage capacity that you'd get from spending a similar amount on a cheap dresser. The towers are indestructible, transparent to allow our daughter to see which drawer contains which toys, and short enough at 24" for her to easily reach everything. Her toys and clothes are grouped by category -- one drawer for Lego, another for puzzles, and so on. She took to the system immediately, and I'm proud to say she replaces her toys in the correct drawers. Placed together along the wall, with the casters removed, they provide a good horizontal surface for her overwhelming assortment of stuffed animals. As she grows, we'll replace them with more permanent furniture and repurpose them.

Cables

I work in the IT industry, and I can tell you that the primary driver for wireless technology is the bloody mess that wires inevitably make. Somewhere in my files is a photograph of the datacom patch panel at our old office, a legacy left by my inept predecessors, which consisted of several hundred twisted-pair patch cables permanently intertwined into a spaghetti-like mass. So impenetrable was the maze that changing a patch meant simply disconnecting the existing cable and adding a new cable, leaving the old cable entangled with its peers like a bit of dead skin in need of exfoliation.

Today, while googling for some power outlets that I could integrate with our conference table, I stumbled across cableorganizer.com, which is a panacea for those plagued with messy masses of cables. I can already feel my discretionary budget leaking out of my department, while visions of orderly, encased cables dance in my head...