Is leaving and entering your home riddled with complications leading to great aggravation? When you look for your keys is there an escalation in your desperation to find them? Every home has an entryway, so let’s take the frustration out of this essential location with what I call a “Destination Station”. Following these tips will make getting out the door of your habitation an emigration to elation. Just a little preparation can start your transformation to front door jubilation.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdentryway.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about destination stations. Now, we’ve had other videos about a destination station, which is simply my phrase for where you enter and exit the house the most often and you pick things up when you leave, and you put things down when you come home. And we’ve talked about these, how to create them and what kind of elements to have in them, and of course we want to have our purse and our keys and our backpacks, but some people have trouble implementing this idea in their homes.
Maybe you live in an apartment or a town home or maybe you just simply have a very narrow hallway where you come in from your back door and it’s very hard for you to figure out how to create this. You don’t have a dedicated mud room or something, or an entryway. So you’re trying to make this idea work. And I have a couple of ideas for you that are a little unconventional. A lot of people are expecting what they see in a magazine when they think of having this kind of entryway piece. They really like the idea of having a little locker for everyone and everyone’s got their own hook with their name on it and it’s all picture perfect. That really might not be realistic for your home.
So one of the things we do is we repurpose other pieces of furniture. And we use pieces of furniture that are small that we can piece together. So, here’s one that is very common in an entryway situation, and that is a bench. Now, a bench is perfect because you want to be able to sit down and put on your shoes or take off your shoes, and you want a flat surface to put a few things down as you need to when you’re coming and going. Here’s the mistake people make with benches. They buy a bench that has a hinged lid that makes the storage accessible from the top. So if you’re trying to pull this lid open and get down in there to the storage, that is not going to work very effectively. It’s human nature to pile things on top of this surface, and it’s going to be hard to get in and out of there. You can do this. If you already have the bench, don’t worry, just make sure you store items inside that are C or D items, as we talk about the frequency of use. Things that you’re not going to need to access very often. Don’t put people’s daily stuff in there and expect them to open and close that every day and get it out.
So what you want to do if you’re buying a bench is look for one that has the storage accessible from the front. This one’s made by ClosetMaid. They have different colors of fabric cubes that fit in here, which I love, and you can just simply pull the cube out, get what’s in here, and then push it back in. So you don’t have to worry about this problem of things being piled up on the top.
Another issue is that you might not be able to have the destination station all in one place. So it’s okay for you to do a two-part destination station. I do this here in my own house. I live in kind of a town home where I have multiple floors. When I come in have Part 1, which is where I hang my coat and I hang the keys on a hook. And then I come upstairs to the main living area and I have this bench where I put my purse down and I have other items that I need to take out with me. And this is a flat surface so that in the main living area I have a place to put things as I think of it, and then I can grab them – it’s right next to the stairs –as I go out to the bottom floor.
So think about having that Part 1 and Part 2. Maybe you walk in a narrow hallway, put your keys on a hook and walk to the end of the hallway and set up a destination station in the beginning part of the kitchen or whatever that room is. Maybe there’s a laundry room you can use for this purpose as well.
You can repurpose any kind of furniture for this that has a flat surface, and maybe a few drawers. So someone I know used a sewing table, an old antique sewing table, and it looks very charming. You can even drill a hole in the back of that furniture into the back of a drawer, run the charger cords through there for your phones, and have this nice little hideaway charging station. There’s all kinds of creative ways to do this. Use hooks, use your other furniture, use your other rooms, and make this work for you. It does not have to look like a magazine photo.
If you like these tips, check out the rest of our YouTube Channel. We have that other video on destination stations and lots more, including full play lists for kitchens and closets and other areas of the home. You can find us at clutterdiet.tv.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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