All about Shoes (& their Organization)

We've kept all the kids' shoes in our mudroom (near the garage and the front door) for many years.  One bin per child, though Katie and Harmony share.

As you can imagine, my kids aren't so consistent with putting their shoes away in their bins and so for several years, one of the kids has been assigned to straighten the mudroom as their afternoon zone (while others are emptying dishwashers or cleaning the great room).

The problem we've run into is that who-ever is cleaning the mudroom has trouble knowing which shoes belong to who.  With Michael similar in shoe size to my twins and the twins in two different sizes this year, plus the compounding factor of several of the same style shoe belonging to different children (uniforms), we ended up with lots of shoes lost or missing just as we needed to leave for somewhere.  Usually, they'd just been put in the wrong person's bin.

We needed a new idea.

Enter duct tape. Lots and lots of patterned and colored duct tape.

I had each child choose a style they liked, then we labeled their bin with it.



 

After that, we cut squares of duct tape and placed them inside the heel of each child's shoes. 
Now, sorting the shoes in the mudroom is simply a matter of matching the colors and patterns.  Easy enough even my three-year-old could do it.

How do you organize your kids' shoes?





Comments

Andrea said…
So clever! I love it.
Ummm, that's just genius!
Courtney said…
Genius Idea!
Megan said…
Smart!
Claire said…
What a great idea...I wish we had the space. My husband built a good sized shoe rack that sits by our front door....it can hold like 2-3 pairs of shoes each. Then I have a back of the door shoe rack in my closet, one in the girls' room, and a bug plastic container of things like rain boots and soccer cleats in my room. I think we have too many shoes!