As a professional wedding designer back in the day, paying attention to detail and keeping all ducks in a row was critical.
Same thing goes in my current assignation as a tablescape blogger.
By all accounts, I am a well-ordered, fairly Type A neat freak who would just as soon cut off my right arm as to have a pillow sitting askew. (Even more interesting because I’m married to the messiest man on the face of God’s green earth.) The 180° of that is that I have stuff…a LOT of decorating stuff. Perhaps more decorating stuff than any one person should have in a lifetime. But I like my stuff, and I plan to keep it. Every dish, every vase, every what-whozit in the place.
And this, dear readers, is where I keep it all…
(Click on any photo, then click again to enhance/enlarge it.)
First, let me tell you I couldn’t stay organized without my handy, dandy Flip Album catalog system. You can download the free version or get the upgraded version like mine for a one-time fee. (Worth it!) It is the ultimate in organization! I photograph and catalog every single thing that comes in the house including quantity and dimensions. It really helps this old brain with planning and keeping track! 
Building your own catalog to fit your specific needs with a Table of Contents, Index, thumbnail overview, and individual chapters is easy. I currently have 3127 pages in 41 chapters, which is up by about 1000 pages since my post “Hoarding: Buried In Dishes & Decor” back in January of 2012. But having things catalogued is one thing….putting all this crap somewhere is something altogether insanely different! (Yes, when you have to find storage for it, it flips from “treasures” to “crap” in a heartbeat! 🙂 ) Our home is relatively small, about 3100 sq. ft. on 3 finished floors. When it comes to the volume we’re talkin’ ’bout here, that 3100 sq. ft. may as well be 310!!! But here’s where it is:
Upon entering our home, there is storage right there in the foyer in the form of a 12-drawer upright apothecary cabinet. It hides scads of napkin rings tucked into Ziploc bags to keep them from tangling up.
This may be how you’re accustomed to seeing our dining room, but lurking behind all the pretties in every available nook and cranny…
Buffet behind dining table – 8 drawers of placemats, flatware and serving utensils
China hutch – piles of white china with gold accents, gold-accented stemware, vintage Dresden.
Drawers in china hutch – filled with placecard paraphernalia.
Meanwhile, across the hall in the library where I like to sit and read (OK, you got me…where I like to sit and look at pictures!)…
This Louis XIV reproduction vitrine is filled with silver, crystal, and six velvet-lined boxes of flatware. I store all silver in plastic bags, plastic wrap or plastic crates to keep tarnish at bay.
The secretary on the other side of the room also holds silver and crystal pieces among the books.
Moving on to the living room…
The living room cupboards store dozens of chargers in various colors and styles.
The bar is laden with lots of stemware above with pitchers and other serving vessels beneath.
The kitchen is home to both everyday dishware and lots of special occasion/tablescaping stuff…
The miniature “pantry” in the kitchen (upper left) is filled with china and accessories. The adjacent glass-front cabinet holds a part of my melamine collection and a few tureens. Cabinets across the room are filled like the one on the upper right with various plates, bowl, mugs and casual dining drinkware.
This little black cabinet beneath the breakfast bar is a new acquisition. It holds more melamine and a few tabletop accessories. I’m still trying to figure out what to store in the 2 drawers.
Ramon has forbidden me from taking you into the garage, so we’ll just mosey on downstairs to the lower level. (I just keep scads of wreaths out there along with a collection of outdoor cushions and pillows.)
The bar area on the lower level looks kind of like this on any given day, but there’s plenty of storage behind all those cabinets and knobs!
Each of the 9 cabinets and 12 drawers is filled with casual dishware, stemware, flatware, and/or serviceware. That bottom right cabinet and 2 others are being outfitted with a 2nd shelf.
These boxes of melamine trays -a gift from a friend who is moving across the country- are waiting to be assigned a space. (There are 32 of them!!!!! Yes, she has just as much of a hoarding problem as I do! 🙂 )
This is one of 2 small closets downstairs that hold lots of crates, mostly autumn and Halloween stuff.
This room – the originally designated storage space in the house – has so much crap in it from crates to candles that I couldn’t get a good panoramic shot.
Here’s more of the stuff in this room. Storing spools of ribbon on pegboards is really convenient. Surprisingly, I know just where to go to get everything!
Enough of this basement level! Let’s go all the way up to the bedroom level.
At the top of the bedroom level steps sits another apothecary cabinet filled with more napkin rings and place card holders.
This is a 4-bedroom house, but only 2 of us live here and we share a bedroom. So…one bedroom is used for storage of faux flowers in crates and oversized vases that have nowhere else to go.
In another of the bedrooms is an area I devote to “staging.” This is what the room looks like on this particular day as I prepare for 3 tablescapes on hold waiting for weather conditions to improve. (By the time Mother Nature decides to cooperate, I’ll most likely forget about doing these and move on to something else!)
Our guest bedroom is rarely actually used by my granddaughter, so there are a few storage opportunities here that can be easily altered when company actually does come a’callin’. The drawers of the antique dresser are filled with chair covers and sashes. The closet is crammed with a portion of my 300+ table linens, stored by color and labeled. My old hope chest is also a good place for storing linens. And then some things are stored right out in plain sight!
I’ve stored dishes in this guest room cabinet for several years now. It just works!
And then there are those items not in plain sight but kept within easy reach! Underbed storage in the guest bedroom has about 150 linens.
Oh, did I forget to mention all the linens hung behind doors?
There’s NO WAY I could photograph my office in its current state!!! I have a lot of projects going on, and it’s a huge mess. There are, however, several bookcases and a table in there with floral vessels (all filled with faux flowers), cake plateaus, assorted figurines, and oversized LED candles. In my office closet, however, are 5 shoe hangers filled with hundreds of napkins. More napkins are stored in plastic drawers on the floor.
Hanging on a towel rack on the door are numerous table runner. The more casual runners are stored in the basement.
Moving on….and we’re walking, we’re walking…
There’s even storage in the seldom used hallway bath cabinets! Look above the cabinets and notice all the stone vases artfully arranged…storage in plain sight!
We have a pretty good-sized walk-in closet in our bedroom, so I take advantage of the shelving above and beneath the clothes. Yes…I hoard clothes, too! 🙂
The area between our bedroom and my dressing room has lots of cabinet space for dishes and stemware!
Beyond a door that appears to be a closet in my dressing room is an attic space built on in 2009. It was supposed to double as a safe room, but there’s nothing safe going on in here, that’s for sure!!! 🙂 It’s not heated or cooled, so I have to really pick & choose my times to access items from this space!
I’m certain I’ve left something out, but you get the idea, right? It’s a mess, but it’s an organized mess!
I’m joining a bunch of other dish-lovin’ bloggers from across the globe for The Tablescaper’s “Where Do You Keep It All?” blog party. C’mon along with me to see what they have up their sleeves!
I’m just going to come out with it: I LIKE STUFF!!!!!! I like dishes and stemware and flatware and linens and all the accessories that can dress up a table, and I like to be able to shop my own home for it when I need it. I’m not ashamed of it…although perhaps I should be. 😉
Tablescapes at Table /Twenty-One 