Trying to Prevent Unsightly Piles

Actually, that could be my mantra as I prepare to set up housekeeping in my new house. I know that every house has it's problem areas, but I'm going to confess mine here to keep me accountable:

1) Kitchen counter/phone area. In our old house, this was desperately needed space. In the new house, there's so much counter that if things start to get stacked up, we could be in serious trouble.

Mostly I want to get really organized in the desk area of the kitchen. Put hanging files in a drawer, something. Anything.

2) Computer hutch. This became a graveyard for items that were shuffled from the kitchen counter. You know, those things that don't have an official home? This has got to change. I got a good start on it before we moved. Now it's just maintaining it.

Also, we are considering putting our desktop on the desk in the kitchen. It was in the hutch in the guest room - totally wouldn't work in the new house. This way we'd actually use it, and the laptop could be more mobile. This change would require the assorted disks/ink cartridges/paper to be stored in a useful way.

3) Laundry room. This is a big necessity now because the "laundry room" is right off the kitchen, instead of way down in the basement. The laundry room used to contain:

a box for future garage sale items, usually overflowing
my "craft" cabinet - not scrapbooking, but everything else. Sewing, fabric, kids stuff...
pantry - bulk items or back ups (of spaghetti sauce & tomato soup, usually)
rarely used cleaning supplies
oh, and the laundry stuff

Garage sale and cleaning can go downstairs, and the food will fit in my cabinets in the kitchen, I hope! The craft items I'm not sure about.

4) Scrapbooking station. Previously this was a folding buffet table with my bags piled around and under. Worked great. Looked...like a big messy pile. We are blessed with a new house with lots of living space, but it doesn't have a "craft" room, where I could have my scrapbooking stuff ready to use anytime. Which is the only way I'll do it, you know.

Even though I've already got the software to start scrapbooking digitally, Aaron's afraid that it will make our laptop crash, and we're procrastinating. I'll probably still do traditional scrapbooking anyway, at least in our yearly family album.

So I'm thinking about getting two pieces of furniture that will allow me to store AND use my scrapbooking materials in the family room.

This one would be the main storage piece. And this one would be the workspace, and also a game table/extra seating for entertaining.

How do you keep craft/hobby materials both tidy and useable? Or, how do you keep your counters cleared? Does anybody actually manage this?