**Note—if you are looking at this from your email or Substack, it might say “Preview” when you click to listen to the episode above. It is NOT just a preview. It is the full episode! You can also listen on the podcast platform of your choice!
**Another important note—it’s my hubby’s birthday! Happy birthday!
Episode 02 of the Casual Simplicity podcast is all about entryways! We’ll chat on what to keep and what to declutter in your entryway, how you might organize your entryway space, and how you might use your entryway to help assist your school year instead of just having a chaotic space where things get thrown and forgotten.
SHOW NOTES
Hey everyone! Last episode we talked about routines and possibly including some visual checklists to your every day. We listed out possible options of routines that could be on these visuals to help with all the daily nagging that comes with more school year structure.
Today, we’re talking all about entryways and how we can declutter them, what we should keep in them, and how we can set them up to be the most efficient for our families during the school year.
I don’t know about you, but in our house, a good chunk of the stress of the day comes from getting out of the house on time. Having an efficient entryway and keeping it clean and ready for the next day is something that helps A LOT.
Regardless of whether you have chosen homeschool, public school, private school, whatever kind of school, the school year in general brings a level of structure and routine that are different from the summer. This episode should be useful for the school year in general, no matter how you have decided to school your kids!
What you’ll learn:
What we should declutter from your entryway
How to keep your entryway organized
What items to keep in your entryway
Brainstorm how your entryway will function for the school year & set it up accordingly
Alright so let’s kick off this episode’s content with the decluttering portion!
What to declutter from your entryway:
Any literal garbage that has collected in this space.
Give it a good vacuum and clean out.
Take out anything that’s out of season. And I mean EVERYTHING out of season, even the upcoming season. Your entryway should be for CURRENT items ONLY. If it’s not currently raining this week, put your rain jackets in a storage space.
Yes, this means you should have some sort of entryway storage space. Some closet or under the bed bin or something where you can keep items that might get pulled out occasionally or items that are for an entirely different season–like swimsuits and snowpants. I like to keep the entirely different season items in our attic space. And I keep our “current or upcoming season, but not in use in the next few days” items in a closet. In the summer, these occasional use items include rain jackets, rain boots, and zip up sweatshirts for cooler nights.
Is there anything else that you don’t use currently or on an almost daily basis in this space?
How to keep your entryway organized:
Think of all the things that you leave your house with and come into your house with. All of these regular things need a space in your entryway.
Then think of where things typically get tossed. For example, usually you kick off your shoes. If you tried to be super wonderful and put the location of shoes up on top of a shelf, the likelihood of shoes making it to the shelf is nearly zero. If you have folders after school or mail from the mailbox that usually gets tossed on the counter and you want these items to be put somewhere else, create a designated space for them. If you have hats and mittens that usually get tossed on the ground even though you’ve nagged and nagged about putting mittens inside of hats and hats inside of coat sleeves, make a bin on a shelf for hats and mittens to help the “toss off” process become a bit more organized but not require much extra effort from the adults and children involved. I think it was Denaye from Simple Families who, in one of her podcast episodes, mentioned putting a sock bucket in her entryway because everyone in her family took their socks off when they came inside and the socks kept not making it to the hampers. So instead of constantly nagging everyone, she just decided to put a sock bucket there. It could have also been for clean socks because everyone always needed socks on their way out. I can’t remember! But I do know there was a sock bucket of sorts. So just find what works for your family and pay attention to what’s already being tossed off or
What is needed to get out the door in this space? Think coats, backpacks, water bottles, purse, diaper bag, etc…things you don’t want to forget and that should stay ready to grab and go!
Possible Organizational Methods
We’re in the process of renovating our entryway area. Right now, nothing is really up. Here’s what I’m planning / have sort of started. We’re working in a *VERY small space. I’d love to have one of those beautifully large entryways with cubbies for each kid and storage right in the same space. But that’s not what our house has available. Instead, we took out a closet door and are using the size of the inside of the closet to create a more open, entryway, hook area that leads right into our kitchen. And when I say right into our kitchen, I mean our refrigerator is literally 6 inches away.
So here’s what we’re planning to have in the area/near this area.
It’s basically going to be a bench, hooks, and a shelf above.
hooks for backpacks, my diaper bag/purse bag, everyone’s current coats (this might mean winter coats and snow suits, sweatshirts and rain jackets, or a fall coat and a rain coat–I often have 1-2 outerwear hanging on my kids hooks because Wisconsin has a lot of transition season time.
Rug under the bench for shoes, possibly individual buckets for the kids so they can keep more than one shoe in the area. NOT 10 pairs of shoes, but like 2 or maaaaaaaybe 3 pairs.
Individual baskets for hats/accessories–In these, I keep, for example in the summer–swim suits and towels. In the winter–hats, mittens, neck gaiters
On the shelf above, I’m hoping to keep in-season extras (like extra hats, gloves, swim stuff, etc.) and a basket of current items in our house that need to be returned to others (like my mom’s tupperware).
Across the way, I have a skinny wall where I keep our family calendar with scheduling events and two mail boxes. We use one as kind of a random space for incoming or outgoing mail and one we plan to use as a school folder drop off.
Let’s just kind of repeat and run through a list of items you might consider keeping in your entryway. I told you what we will keep in ours already and it didn’t include some of these because we just don’t have the space. So do what works for YOUR family and YOUR lifestyle and season of life.
**Reminder: These are CURRENT items ONLY.
Current coats
1 sweatshirt per kid
Hats / mittens / scarves / swimwear (seasonal outerwear accessories)
Seasonal shoes
Backpacks (water bottles inside)
Lunch boxes (Maybe keep these inside of backpacks)
Library books
“Return to” basket–aka a basket of all the crap that needs to be returned to people–like the tupperware
Your bag / diaper bag
Incoming / outgoing mail box
Place for school folders
Family calendar
Think about how your entryway will function for your school year–
Place for backpacks
Place for outerwear (coats, hats, etc.)
Place for shoes
Place for school folders (because they’re something YOU have to help take care of)
System for water bottles (if you’ve got school age kids, then you have old enough kids to fill up a water bottle on their own and replace it to their backpack)
Possibly a place for school library books or take home bags or homework if your school does something like that and you participate with those activities at night
Okay so we chatted decluttering, what to rid of, what to keep, how you might want to organize your things, and how your entryway might function well for you this school year.
I don’t want to skip over saying this.
Where do you go when you leave your entryway and walk outside? The car, right? To go do all those school drop offs, pick ups, errands, etc. I mean maybe your kids go to the bus like I did growing up, but for a lot of people they go to their cars.
We’re not going to get into car routines today, but having a system for getting everyone in your car is going to also help save some sanity! Really quickly, I’ll just say this–I treat my car as an extension of my house, meaning, I keep it cleaned up at least a little. I deep clean it far less in the winter months, but generally speaking I remove garbage, pick up car toys, tidy it up a little. I keep it FUNCTIONAL. So our kids can easily get in and out.
Here’s our little system for what happens when we exit our house–
Our oldest opens the door and holds it for the littles. They all walk to the van and get in while I’m grabbing the last of the items from inside. When we get out of the car, we make sure everyone’s buckles are loosened so they can get into their car seats and put their straps on. Our 3.5 year old and 5 year old buckle themselves. Our 2 year old gets into his seat and waits. I buckle the 2 year old first so he can no longer escape. Then I go tighten the bigger girls car seats before getting into the driver seat. My bag goes in the same spot every time. We keep our trunk floor clear so if we have anything extra to toss in, it goes in there!
We could have an entire episode on decluttering, cleaning, and keeping our cars functional, but I just wanted to draw some attention to the importance of continuing the system once you exit your entryway area because the hopping in the car portion of getting out of your house can be where more big breakdowns happen!
Wrap up
Alright, so that wraps up our month of September and our “back to school” episodes.
Last episode we chatted daily routines and visual kid checklists. Today, we talked about setting our entryways up for a little less chaos.
We have an organization checklist and a list of items you might consider keeping in your entryway available as a printable for our paid supporters on Substack. Obviously you don’t need them in pretty printable format so don’t feel pressured but if you want to support the podcast and newsletter and join our paid supporters, that option is always there and you get some goodies like this in return!
Now, because we’re going to be having our fourth baby in October (sneaking up on us), we have a few “baby” related episodes intermixed with some holiday prep episodes for the upcoming months of October and November!
Talk to you in October!
<3 Tash
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