When you have a lot of kiddos, you have a lot of shoes! They are everywhere all over the house, yet the crazy thing is it is next to impossible to find a matching pair when you need them!
Enter our newest organizational tool…the Play Shoes Crate!
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Back when we used to do Workboxes, I purchased several black milk crates to house the files we were using for a modified workbox system. However, years later, the milk crates were just taking up space in storage. (Funny how I have storage items IN storage!)
With all these little boys, we end up with a lot of play shoes and no great place to put them – especially when they are muddy. So, I decided to pull 2 of the crates out (black was definitely a good color choice!), and put one by each of the most used doors.
Piling the shoes into the crate is easy work for any one of the children, and it keeps the floors by the doors free of shoe clutter and the shoes easy to find. On really muddy days, I’ll put a junk towel by the back door to line the shoes on and get them dry before putting them in the crate, but for the most part, when you come in from playing, your shoes go in the crate – thank you very much!
Andrea says
An old sturdy laundry basket works great as well! Especially for muck boots! They take up a lot of space. What is really nice about keeping them all contained, when we go to see Grandma and Grandpa with their five acres of exploration and their beautiful rock bottom creek, we just throw the whole laundry basket with play shoes and muck boots into the back of the van.
Karen says
When I first read your title, the image that popped into my head where the play high heels that little girls like to wear. My first thought was why anyone would create a crate for play shoes when shoes for a large family in general can be so overwhelming. Then I figured out you were talking about shoes that they PLAY in. LOL!!!! That made me feel better.
Shoes are my nemesis (along with socks.) We “solved” the shoes by buying one of the square shelves with nine cubbies and assigning a cubby to each person and then having sock boxes: one for boys socks and one for girls socks. It works OK until the little girls forget to put their shoes in their shoes box. URGH!!! I’ve done this for years. I do like the crate idea. That might mix up things up a bit, especially for the little girls.
We also limit the littles shoes to tennis shoes and sandals (or boots and Mary Janes in the fall for the girls). I demand that they wear sandals because it cuts down on the socks. Maybe I’m just being lazy. We inevitably have to do a sock reboot at the beginning of the fall. I’ve considered taking out stock in Hanes just to benefit from all the socks (and underwear for that matter.)
Amy says
The sock thing is still an enigma to me! I’ve heard (and tried) all the ideas, but for some reason, I still end up with a crazy mess of socks – not to mention the singles that lost their mates! I don’t have room for a shoe cubby the size I would need, so the crate made things nice and compact!
Rebecca says
This works well for ANY size family. I don’t have a half dozen kids but we have several pairs of flip flops we wear into the yard or to the pool, my garden shoes, my husbands work boots and a pair of old tennis shoes he wears to cut the grass and it all adds up to too much clutter on the porches. Add to that, all the tracking up the porch with dirt, rocks, cut grass,etc off the shoes. We use a basket to dump them all in and it at least gives the appearance of tidying up.
Amy says
I definitely appreciate the “appearance” of tidying up! lol
Jessica says
That’s what we do too! We’re currently house-hunting and saw a house that had a staircase right by the back door where they had made one of the steps able to open (like a toy box lid) and they used that! I thought it was such a neat idea!
Socks generally fit a variety of shoe sizes, so with our family I have a basket of little boy socks and a basket of big boy socks. I buy basic plain white crew socks every time so there’s no need to match them up, just toss them in the basket. Little girl socks just go in her drawer 😉
Shannon says
I do almost the same thing! I use the stackable containers with holes In the front, plus one crate on the bottom turned sideways. We have 6 kids, 5 that are in shoes, plus mom and dad. Shoes make me crazy when they are all over the place and this is a perfect solution.
Sandra says
I have 11 children, in a 700sq. ft. House in the UK, and a *very* muddy small garden, no matter what we’ve tried everyone gets other people’s shoes and boots muddy, we tried a large outside storage box for big boots, but with little people going out more often and piling muddy boots onto older tidier children’s, that worked for less than a year, plus the slugs and damp were a serious deterant, so the children kept running pair after pair of shoes literally into the ground. We still have the outside boots, but with Zero floor space only enought to open the back door, I’ve found a 12 pair hanging door rack with cloth “baskets” I got two, one for muddy shoes that hangs on the outside of the bathroom door right beside the back door, and another for clean/inside shoes and slippers, on the inside of the airlock door. The idea is to take of clean shoes, put them into “your” slots, change into outside mucky shoes, and then change back again replacing the muddy shoes in the muddy bags when they come in. It is possible to do this without muddying someone else’s shoes, because adults are at the top, so older peoples shoes aren’t getting mud from the younger ones getting piled all over them. If/when there are shoes on the floor, no one can even get into our one tiny bathroom without tripping or getting muddy from shoes on the floor, so it’s a case of pick them up off the floor and put away at the same time as you get to the bathroom. It’s also pretty easy to identify who the culprits are, and where more supervision/training is required, even if mud saturated shoes can’t be recognised because it’s obviously their shoe bags which are empty. Socks, well, IMO those are optional unless we are going somewhere, and who really cares if the unmatched sock box doesn’t have any matching pairs as long as your 5 year old can find two! Hope this helps if anyone doesn’t have room for a shoe crate or bucket. ?