How to Organize Your Dining Room Before the Holidays

We recently organized the dining room just in time for the holidays so we'll be prepared for all of the guests that will be joining us in the coming months!

I admit, our dining room is usually far from the most used room in our house. We actually eat most of our meals at the kitchen island, so our dining room is more of a pretty space that no one touches that I can decorate to my heart's content. #truestory 🙂

BUT at this time of year, the dining room gets to have its moment(s) in the spotlight! With Thanksgiving and Christmas and all of the holidays coming up over the next few months, it will quickly become one of the main gathering spaces in our home, so I figured that I should probably get it organized before all of the craziness ensues!

Tour Our Organized Dining Room

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How to Organize Your Dining Room Before the Holidays

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I recently switched some things around in this space to make it more organized. I love that I was able to reorganize using only items I had on hand-- I spent $0 on organization in here-- and I’m excited to show you around!

We have two storage pieces in the dining room: a hutch that used to be my grandmother’s that I painted a few years ago, and then a sideboard/buffet.

As I shared last week, this sideboard actually used to be my kids’ dresser, but I recently gave it a makeover to turn it into a cute storage piece for the dining room. I love that it has a little display area that makes it pretty, but also has a section for really functional storage.

I mostly wanted to bring in this piece to hold our table linens because I knew the drawers would be perfect for it. I lined all of the drawers with a pretty drawer liner and then began filling them up!

The top drawer holds our cloth napkins, which are just stacked by type. We don’t use these on a day-to-day basis, so we just have a few basic colors.

When I go to decorate our table for a special occasion, I like to keep it pretty simple, so I usually use a neutral colored table cloth, and then I use a runner to change up the look for the season or event.  The second drawer in the sideboard holds all of the runners...

Since there are a bunch of them, I used the filing method of folding that I shared here to organize them. I can easily see what I have and pull out the one I want to use. I also have a set of pretty green placemats that I will sometimes use at Christmastime. I used some little wooden boxes that I already had to corral them and again folded them using the filing method, so they all stay neat and tidy.

The next drawer holds my tablecloths, which are just neutral! Since there are only two plus the one that is on the table currently, I didn’t really need to file them-- there is plenty of room in the drawer!

I also keep a few hot pads in this drawer that I use to protect the table when we put down a hot casserole dish or something similar.

The bottom drawer of the sideboard holds a few “kid friendly” items...

These plates are pretty, but they’re plastic, so they’re perfect for the kiddos to use. And my boys get a kick out of this tablecloth that looks like a football field that I will pull out for games sometimes. It is vinyl-ish material and easy to wipe down, making it perfect for kids.

I also have a few shelves that add some extra storage, but they are mostly there to look pretty!

Open shelves are great for storing “collections,” when you have multiples of one item to store, so I have cake stands in a few sizes on the top shelf and white pitchers on the bottom.

That about does it for the sideboard! Let’s take a peek inside the hutch on the other side of the room...

I always like to change up the decor on the shelves for each season, so they are definitely more decorative than organizational. 🙂

In the drawer of the hutch, I store the different types of pads that we put on the bottom of our furniture to keep them from scratching the floor...

I used an extra desk organizer that I had on hand to separate the different types of pads. (It is similar to this one.) My little sideboard wasn’t deep enough to hold these round placemats, so they take up the other half of the drawer.

I really like to decorate shelves and trays and different areas of my house seasonally, so in the bottom of the hutch, I keep the dishware that I use more for decorating than for eating. (Our everyday dishes are housed in the kitchen.)

The baskets are Crate & Barrel from about 10 years ago, and I’ve used them all around our home! (They actually still carry similar ones here.) Right now they’re holding my decorative mugs.

I put a little adhesive bookplate on the front of each basket, and I purchased a new label maker recently that can make labels in cursive and other fun fonts, so I used it + a little piece of scrapbook paper to create my pretty labels.

(I may do a full post on the new label maker soon because I've loved it so much! Let me know if that would be helpful...I admit that I kind of nerd out on that sort of thing! 😉 )

The bottom shelf of the hutch holds plates, bowls, and other decorative items I use for my decor...

The key here was that I only kept the items that we need or use often. I had several things that had sat for years without use, so it was a waste of space to store something I wasn’t going to use. I donate any unwanted items if they’re in good shape or throw them out if they’re broken or unusable.

So that’s our organized dining room! It’s super simple but it makes it easy to find what we need, and now we're ready to welcome our guests for the holidays in the coming months!

What types of things do you store in your dining room? Let me know in the comments!

For more ideas for getting organized before the holidays, see these posts:

How to Create an Organized Gift Wrap Station

5 Simple Things You Can Do to Plan Ahead for the Holiday Season

5 Quick Tips for Decluttering Toys Before the Holidays

5 Printables to Help You Get Organized for the Holidays

[Psssttt… Organize every room of your house with our 100 best home organization tips!]

Have a wonderful day!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.