Back-to-school doesn’t have to mean back-to-rush. Organization for school can help get everyone off to a good start. Are you looking for a way to help your children be organized for school? Would you like to calm your morning rush and smooth your morning routines? Watch this video to see my Destination Station and how this area can organize the daily routine. Following these tips will make organizing for school and your daily routines more efficient. It will even help you find your keys.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDDestination.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about what we call destination stations.
Now, we have had some requests from some of you to see a tour of what my destination station looks like in my home so that’s what I’m doing today. I’m just going to show you what ours is like. What I’m talking about is that area where you enter and exit the house the most frequently where you need to have a home for things, to put things down, like your keys and your purse and the kids’ backpacks and your coats and shoes and any items that you need to take out on errands. Anything that needs to come and go with you needs to have a home in this station of your house. There’s lots of ways to do this. This is how we did it, so let me show you where we are.
We are by the back door to the garage. We come in from the car this way every day. On the back of this door – you might be able to see a little bit of it; I know it’s in some of the other videos – but we have a little bulletin board here where we hold coupons and gift certificates so we can see that on our way out and grab important coupons that need to go out with us. Also on the opposite wall we have – in also another video you can see – a mirrored hook station where we have sunglasses and keys. So that’s kind of the first stop when we walk in, we hang up our keys right there. Over here, this is a coat closet that was here but I removed the door, because that’s one of the keys, you want to have very easy access to this station so you can just put things immediately down when you walk in the door. Everybody in the family has their own shelf, and in addition, we have another shelf called the “errand shelf,” and that is anything that needs to be taken out of the house. For example, these pants need to get hemmed, and these shoes need to go to the shoe hospital, and these glasses need to be fixed, and these things need to be returned to stores. So all of that stuff has a place to be, and I can see that every time I leave the house so I can grab whatever it is that makes sense for me to grab when I’m on my way out.
My shelf has my little purse items usually here. I’ve got a basket full of extra purse items like Kleenex packets and extra mints and gum and things like that, that I might want in my purse. And then the boys have their own shelves where they put their stuff down from school. Also, this is a great place for me to put things for them to find them later. If I find things scattered around the house, I grab it and I just stick it on their shelf so they know to look there if they’re missing something.
Also, down here we have shoes and socks. And when the boys were younger that was even more important. When we were getting ready to go somewhere, instead of running all the way upstairs to their closets to get shoes and socks, we had most of the ones they’d commonly wear right here. They like taking them off when they come in the door anyway, so this was a way to accommodate that habit they already had and make things simpler for everybody.
Now again, you can do this lots of different ways. If you don’t have a coat closet to repurpose like this, you can use a piece of furniture. They sell great mudroom furniture nowadays that has little lockers and cubbies [POP] and hooks. You can put a row of hooks on a wall. You can use an old sideboard or even an old sewing cabinet I’ve used in a house before. Anything that you can repurpose that will give you homes for all of these types of items.
Now, if you would like to do this kind of project in your house, this is something that my team can help you with. We’ve helped thousands of people in over 18 countries around the world on-line, giving you help and advice. You can upload photos to show us what’s going on. We can recommend some solutions for your particular situation. You can find out more about that at clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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