A living room is one of the most used spaces in a home and one that typically needs to accommodate multiple tasks, ranging from entertaining and relaxing to working from home. To help you keep the space organized, we asked a professional organizer to share the top five things that make living rooms look cluttered.
Read on to find out what you need to avoid, so you don’t have a cluttered living room.
Meet the Expert
Laura Cattano is a professional organizer and founder of Laura Cattano Organizational Design.
Lack of a Good Balance of Open and Closed Storage
A good balance of open and closed storage is essential in a living room, as it strikes the right balance between practicality and visual appeal.
Laura Cattano, a professional organizer and founder of Laura Cattano Organizational Design, explains how a lack of these two storage options is one of the main things that make a space look cluttered. Cattano personally loves using drawer units or cabinets instead of just open shelves or open media units to hide everything she has that doesn’t need to be out in the open.
This pertains to everything from office supplies, extra cords, and books, all of which may be used and needed in a living room, but don’t necessarily need to be on full display at all times. To break up all the closed storage, she recommends creating a balance with open storage.
“Open shelves should be for decorative items, things that tell a story about who you are, things that help the room to feel the way you’d like it to feel; calm, inspired, energetic—whatever works for you,” Cattano says.
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Not Having Designated Storage
Cattano recommends creating designated storage for items you use on a regular basis.
“Don’t make the mistake of having those items stored inconveniently elsewhere, as they will tend to stay out on a surface or in a corner as it’s too much work to put in the closet down the hall where it lives,” Cattano says.
Sort through your items to see how frequently you actually use them in the living room and move the less frequently used items to another area.
Inadequate Storage
Another key thing to look out for are overflowing baskets, drawers, and cabinets that things fall out of when opened, or things that cannot be accessed or put away easily.
To create a functional organizational system for your living room, take inventory of the space and the items in it. Inadequate living room storage will lead to a cluttered space that’s hard to keep clean and relax in. To remedy this, Cattano suggests getting rid of things you no longer need or buying a larger storage unit.
Messy Cords
Most living rooms house a large number of things that need to be plugged in, from permanent items such as TVs and light fixtures to portable devices like phones and laptops. While we may use all of them on a daily basis, proper cord management is essential to prevent the living room from looking cluttered.
“Taking the time to tuck cords behind a piece of furniture goes a long way in reducing visual clutter”, Cattano says.
Additionally, you can hide cords in a cable management box, use an outlet concealer with an extension cord where possible, or create a charging station to corral charging devices in one spot.
Things That Have Piled Up Over Time
“We tend to have blindness to the things in our homes that stay in one place too long, things that we should get rid of but for whatever reason just don’t”, Cattano says.
Whether it’s old magazines or a stack of board games, she says these things pile up over time and we eventually stop seeing them. To avoid this clutter trap, Cattano recommends looking at your space with fresh eyes. This way, you will be able to actually see if these items are adding or taking away from your life or space now, Cattano says.
