Creating Orderly Family Rooms

Family rooms are the center of household life, and chances are that’s where you’ll find the people you love, trailing their stuff behind them. Factor in “entertainment clutter” in the form of electronic devices, reading material, and board games, and it’s clear that keeping the family room inviting and orderly represents a special challenge.

Rise to the occasion by negotiating appropriate activities, stripping down the area to basics, and finding creative storage solutions.

Activity Centers for Shared Spaces

Ask an average family what goes on in the family room, and the answers will be all over the map. Common activities for this shared space can include these:

•  Watching television and movies

•  Working on the computer

•  Playing video games

•  Eating snacks

•  Doing homework

•  Reading books and periodicals

Evaluate what’s on the activity center list for your family room, and then clear the decks by identifying and relocating activities that don’t belong in this shared space. Move the computer station to the home office area or household command center to free up space and storage. If snacking is a problem, negotiate a “no food” policy; while unpopular, it can go a long way toward improving the atmosphere of the family room.

Décor, too, needs to adapt to the public purpose of the area. Simplify decorating and scale back on designer touches. Use the walls to display photos and knick-knacks, or restrict them to a single shelf; this keeps coffee tables and end tables clutter free.

When you’re stripping surroundings for family room action, don’t neglect media items. Review movie and audio collections for duplicate titles. Do you need to have VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray editions of the same movie? Can you substitute a video-by-mail subscription or a streaming option for an owned library of favorite movies?

In the same vein, evaluate media platforms with an eye to making room in the entertainment center. If your Blu-ray player is backward compatible, there’s no need to retain the old DVD player, and still less need to hold on to an antique VHS system. Move music collections to a digital format and release physical CD disks and cases. Keep the fun and cull the stuff to make best use of shared space.

SPEEDY SOLUTION

Magazine files have come a long way from their drab office-supply-store beginnings. Vivid colors and designer patterns bring a decorating spark to bookcases; inside, they keep magazine collections, torn-out articles, or recipes at your fingertips.

Storage Ideas for Entertainment, Books, and Music

The principle of clutter containment goes a long way toward cutting down on chaos in the family room. Use baskets to corral remotes and game controllers, store magazines in magazine racks, and stack newspapers in shallow baskets on shelves or under tables. Containing entertainment clutter will keep what you need where you need it.

Do DVDs and video game disks abandon their cases to hang out in dusty corners of the family room? Bow to the inevitable and protect your digital investment; store movie, music, and game disks in disk storage notebooks or disk organizers. Disks will be protected and easy to find, and you’ll never again play “Open the Case” to try to locate the missing copy of A Christmas Story.

Tap spaces under shelves and furniture, sliding DVD-filled media boxes underneath end tables. Cable or satellite boxes can live neatly in the space below the entertainment center, if you place their feet on a thin square of plywood to raise them up off the carpet for better air circulation.

Behind the entertainment center, cable wraps or cable organizers keep cables out of sight and safe from children or pets. Be careful to segregate cables when wrapping them; power cables can interfere with signals flowing through audio and video cables, so bundle them separately.

To relieve crowding on family room bookcases, relocate specialty titles to their point of use: cookbooks in the kitchen, idea books in the crafts area, computer books shelved near the computer desk. Assess the surviving books with a critical eye, and put your library on a diet. Reference books and favorite novels make the cut; old school textbooks and dated nonfiction titles can be donated.

Households with children know how quickly a family room can come to resemble a day-care center that’s been hit by a hurricane. Building in end-of-day toy pickup routines can help; adding color-coded baskets or stacking bins gives toys a place to congregate without being in the way.