31 Days of Organizing Tips: Day 25 (Entry)

Welcome to Day Twenty Five of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series! Throughout this series I’m sharing organizing tips that will help you on your journey from overwhelmed to organized.

Today’s tips focus on a very important and often overwhelming area in your house. The entry. The place you come into your home after a hard day of work. Where you walk in with arms full of bags after running errands. The spot your kids drop everything when they come home from school, sports, or activities. The area you grab everything from when you’re running out the door. The transition zone between home and the rest of the world and home again.

This area of your home can set the tone for the rest of your house. It can determine whether you begin your day frantically searching for things on the way to the car, or confidently focused on the day ahead. It can be a dumping ground that you face every time you walk in, or a welcoming place for you, your family, and your guests.

Here are some tips to help your entry be an organized zone that helps make your transitions through it stress free.

1.  Have a place for coats, hats, mitts, shoes and boots. Whether you have a closet or coat tree or hooks, everyone should know where their outdoor clothing belongs. Make sure kids can reach everything themselves. Hooks generally are easier for kids than hangers.

Mudroom Storage

2.  Designate a place for purses, bags, and backpacks. The floor is not a shelf. Use your vertical space to help keep the floor in the entry area uncluttered. Strong hooks work well (just like your kids use at school). If you have space for baskets or bins near the entry those work well too. Below is the system we’ve used for over 10 years.

Command Centre: School Gear

3.  Make a “home” for important items you need every time you go out such as keys, phones, sunglasses, and wallets. If you always put them there you will never have to search for them! You can use hooks for keys and baskets for wallets and sunglasses. I love this cute DIY idea for a tray!

DIY Catch-All Tray

4.  Decide where your mail and other papers will go, so when they come in the door they always go to that spot (rather than several different places in your house or accumulating in the entry area). Whether your papers go to a command centre or an office, or a basket near the entry until you deal with them, you need a specific plan to deal with paper that enters your home. Have a recycling bin close by helps too for junk mail, envelopes, etc.

Entryway paperwork and recycling station

5.  Use baskets or bins or hooks (or a combination of all of them) to contain sports equipment, instruments, library books, dance shoes, and other gear. Whatever items come in and out of your home regularly for the activities your family members participate in. If you have space in the garage for larger items (hockey bags, tennis racquets, etc.) that’s helpful, but if not, establish where these items will “live” so they aren’t making your entryway a mess.

Organized Equipment

6.  Tidy the entry area Every Single Day. Even multiple times if you have to. Don’t let anything stay there that doesn’t belong there. It just piles up otherwise and becomes overwhelming very quickly.

Please remember to pin from the original source for all of these lovely pictures!

For Day Twenty Five, put away anything in your entry area that doesn’t belong there. Then assess what organizing tip would make the biggest difference in controlling the chaos that comes in and out of your home on a daily basis. Implement that tip and then don’t forget to show your family members what you expect of them. Allow some time for old habits to break and new habits to form. Then enjoy your organized entry!

How do you organize your entry?  What’s the best organizing tip you’ve implemented?

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else. 

Happy organizing!