This whole shoe organization thing is really getting me down. Think about the sheer volume of the problem. From an organizational standpoint, there are an almost endless number of sorting possibilities. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, kids’ shoes, dress shoes, casual shoes, work shoes, dancing shoes, heels, flats, sandals, boots, tennis shoes, sneakers, cross-trainers, basketball, golf and running shoes. Slippers (that you only wear in the house) and those shoes that you don’t want anybody bringing into the house, ever.
Then there is that impulse we all have to just kick off whatever shoes we are wearing, wherever we happen to be standing, the moment we get home…and leave them there. This frequently results in people tripping over them, a large pile of shoes in the middle of a room which has nothing to do with shoes, the dog chewing on them, and everyone’s complete and total inability to find the pair of shoes they are looking for (“Mom, have you seen my shoes?”).
Then you have the families who, either due to the climatic region they live in, the little bit of Buddhist in all of us, or the obsessive-compulsive nature of the clan leader, everyone has to take their shoes off as soon as they get home in a mud room or other entry location. Are shoes then supposed to be transported by hand to the wearer’s closet, and what if they are coated with mud or snow?
While we can conjure up humorous images from all of these scenarios, there is actually something to be learned here when designing a system for organizing shoes. That is that there may not be one hard and fast system that works best for everyone, or even for everyone in a family. Before designating yourself as the family “shoe police,” give some thought to the activity patterns and needs of the family. If you design an organization system that requires every family member to keep each pair of shoes in a cubby hole, organized by color, season, activity, and frequency of use, the system is doomed for failure from the start.
What probably will work is setting forth the general principle that you will not tolerate piles of shoes all over the house, and that nobody should be in the situation of having to send out a search party to look for their shoes while everyone else is waiting at the car to leave.
Think about offering some alternatives to help everyone participate in the organization system. These alternatives might include:
1. A shoe rack, over the door organizer, or shoe-sized cubby holes located near where family members come home, e.g., near the entry from the garage, or in the hall or coat closet near the front door (or both). This would be a place to keep everyday shoes, the ones that people where most frequently to school, work and play.
2. For other shoes such as dress shoes that only come out on special occasions, multiple pairs of boots (cowboy or high fashion), etc., it might be best to insist that each person organize those shoes in their own closets. When the “specialty” shoes are work,, they should be put back where they belong when arriving home. In other words, they don’t just get added to the mud room mountain of shoes.
3. Shoes can be stored in boxes (clear plastic is always nice for avoiding opening 20 boxes looking for the right shoe). Or you can put easy to read labels on the ends of regular shoe boxes that describe the pair inside in a way that the user will relate to and quickly recognize (“pink flat sandals that I like to wear to the beach”).
Whatever system you devise – and it really doesn’t matter what the system is as long as it is something that the family can live with – insist on compliance. A system of hard and fast consequences can work, e.g., “any shoes not in one of the proper places designated for shoes for more than 48 hours will be put in the box going to charity.”
These are just some ways to start thinking about organizing your family’s shoes. No one system is going to work for everyone – you have to come up with a plan that works for the way your family lives.
And now that I have shared this invaluable wisdom with you, I have to go home and clean out my closet – if I could just find my shoes!
