Basket Case

Tonight my friend Lisa and her family are coming over for pizza. Lisa is pretty and kind and has the tidiest house I've ever been in. She is gracious and polite and will compliment me on the things we've done around the house and she'll mean it. That said, I am freaking out about the crazy mess that my house is right now. We are horizontally challenged in this house, meaning, if there is a horizontal surface, we will cover it with crap. I know it drives Tom crazy. He went to military school and detests clutter. He's not like the Sleeping With the Enemy Guy, but I think he may be impressed with what he was able to get out of Julia Roberts. We have a coffee table that I love. It is one of four pieces of furniture that we own from Pottery Barn. We bought it in Georgetown right after we got married. A coffee table, 2 end tables and a floor lamp. The lamp has been repeatedly knocked over and broken through the years and I keep putting her back together. My sisters would laugh when we were on the phone and I would yell to my toddlers "not the Pottery Barn lamp!!!!" The coffee table is constantly being sent to the basement. Frankly, we can't handle it. But we need it. I know when I walk into the living room there will be all variety of crap on the table, and I have no idea where to begin with the decluttering. So I keep buying baskets to hide our dirty little secrets in, all over the house. Tom hates this. A few times a year he goes around the house and returns all of these little items to their rightful homes and throws the rest away. Then he stacks the baskets in the basement until I find them and start the process all over again. We also have lovely built-ins all over our house. I hate them. This assaults my senses:

I feel like this could work if I just neaten it up a bit. And I desperately need to paint the shelves: