Tidy Home Tuesday - Hallways...

The Flylady tells me that this week I should focus on my hallway and the dining room. Why these two rooms are handled in one go I can't tell, but I suspect that in a lot of households the dining room doesn't see that much action. A lot of families eat in the kitchen and keep the dining room for 'best', right? 

Well, we also eat in the kitchen most days, but because the dining room connects to the lounge with a set of permanently open double doors it's more an extension of the living room. In addition it tends to be the place where most craft projects take place (since it is a fairly large table), and it's lined with bookshelves and therefore functions as a sort of library too. That's a lot of functions for one room, and it does look a bit battered at times...

The hallway also looks a bit battered - most of the time. This is probably the highest traffic area of the house, and I tend to pick up discarded shoes, bags, jumpers and coats several times a day. 

For ages now I've been thinking of hanging some pictures on the wall to make it look a bit more homely, but the truth is, it's not all that wide, and therefore the walls get scuffed quite a bit. Having pictures there is probably not the best idea. 

As it is this isn't a particularly loved space. It's OK, but it is definitely a space to move through rather than to linger in. But then again, unless you have a grand entrance hall that invites you to linger, isn't that usually the case? 

The Flylady asked me to spend 15 minutes in this space today, just picking up and sorting things that are not in their rightful place or things that should be binned. 

I can do this, I thought, and promptly managed to get rid of a few old pairs of shoes that were somehow still in the shoe cabinet even though they had been outgrown. I also sorted through some of the paperwork that littered the shoe cabinet / console table and then placed a little jug of allotment flowers on top. 

There, that wasn't too bad, was it? ;)