Oh, I wish I knew! In an effort to declutter, I emptied a top drawer and started shoving everything in there. don't do that. Then I tried a basket on the kitchen table. That didn't work either. How do you get the stuff to rise to the top instead of sink to the bottom? I couldn't even get In/Out baskets on my desk to work.

I ended up putting a dreaded desk in my kitchen. I have drawers on the left. The bottom one is a file cabinet with labels on the inside for kids band, sports, etc. Under the desk, I have 3 baskets to the left that I can pull out for magazines and another flip top basket (all from Pier One) for clutter.

You can build a large message center into your kitchen, if you have room, which includes cork board, and clear pockets on the insides of the doors for the menus and lists, etc.

It sounds like it's mostly school related. Do you have room in a family room or den for it? Maybe a cabinet with file pockets and a bulletin board?

This is meant for computers, but would work for sorting the school stuff too:

Or you could have a hot file sorter and a write on magnet board:

You can use cubbies for each kid's detritus plus cubbies for supplies. Mount them on the wall, if you have a wall, and when the kids grow up paint them, and put cool vases and objet d'art in/on them.

Or you could go full on Pottery Barn:

My kitchen clutter is mostly things like glass cloches that are inconvenient to put away so sit too long on the counter... What's great about my new kitchen is that there's very little space for things to accumulate. If I tear out catalog pages I have to transfer them to my desk in another room or there's nowhere to eat breakfast. If I take down cookbooks to browse through, I have to put them away or shuttle them around the island because they're in the way. I guess I lucked out. There's a little extra counter space for kitchen items clutter, but unlike the mound of unsorted paper I had in the old kitchen, my new kitchen tends to shed paper quickly. I think that's because all that stuff got relocated to the desk during the remodel and it stuck!

Without an office, and a small kitchen, I did use a 10x14 basket, and the side of my fridge that was slightly hidden (like a bulletin board). It wasn't perfect, but when company came, I transferred the things on the fridge to the basket and moved the basket to the pantry or another closet. The basket was basically my "desk." Looking back,(my kids are grown now)it ended up being a pretty good system. I just had to go through it occasionally and purge, file, etc.

It goes onto the stairs where the next person who walks up the stairs is tasked with dropping it into my office/laundry/library room.

And that's where the clutter is...
and the room where the answer to "where's my xxxx?" is.

By the time the kids are gone maybe my DH will be trained and it will be only *my* clutter in there... yeah right...

It all gets piled onto the small section of counter at the end of the frig/pantry run. Below the counter is a bank of four drawers, two for office/school supplies and one each for DH and I to put stuff that we want to keep handy, although DH's drawer is still empty after 16 months in the house. It isn't the tidiest or most perfect arrangement, but as long as the stuff stays off my island and the other counters, I'm willing to live with it.

Totally Confused

I am going to try to keep it in our new laundry room. We also inherited a small secretary desk we put in the family room. So will see what works between those two. Before we had two drawers in kitchen, but became more like junk drawers.

OT - marcydc...we are doing a library - laundry room area too. Do you have pics of yours?

Heehee, it's probably not what you expect. I'm in San Francisco and space is a premium here. Grand laundry rooms don't exist here for the most part.

The room is a 9x13 former bedroom, that has doors on both of the short sides. It's a pass through to my new master bedroom, which is in the space formerly a sunroom (house is a 1916 Edwardian).

The "office" part is a computer armoire something like the 1st pic pllog posted. The laundry part is a stackable Asko in the closet (heaven to have laundry now on the same level as the bedrooms). And the "library" part is a row of 7 feet of 8 feet tall book cases, still currently on order from the cab maker. Books are in boxes at the moment...

A small credenza collects the clutter... I find the less space you have to store clutter, the quicker it finds its way to its home ;)

Great ideas, thanks! The folder systems are a very good idea, and one of the hanging file sorters would be great on the side of the fridge that is mostly hidden. I think maybe we'll put one of those armoirs in our living room for the computer. That was my other problem, having a computer for the kids where I can see them, but I don't want to look at it all the time. Dh keeps telling me I'll miss the clutter one day when the kids are gone, and I'm sure he's right, but for now it drives me crazy!