Warning, HDTV is stealing shoes!

   Being an organization nut naturally draws me to to the storage bin isle at every store. I could spend hours pondering over new and creative ways to organize, well just about everything. I love furniture designed to store things. I adore baskets and shelves. I have a great affection for office supply stores that have rows and rows of bins and trays and filing cabinets.

    

   This same tendency also draws me to home design and organizing shows. Watching the likes of Nate Burkus (I know, his show is not on any more) and Design on a Dime give me inspiration and  creative ideas that I could utilize in my own home. That is, if I get past vacuuming and mopping and wiping finger prints off the walls and doors after the kids played detective. With the amount of laundry and dishes, one would think about 15 people lived here. And my dear bird Chirp seems determined to spread feathers everywhere. I have enough to build an entire flock. So my love for all things organized does not always equate to my being an organization activist. 

   But once in awhile, a project comes along that simply must be done. No, I am not talking about the tupperware cabinet. If you close the door fast enough, the stuff stays inside. I am talking about the coat and shoe and boot and whatever area that leads into the house. Mine currently looks like this.

   This is just a small glimpse at the chaos that we face every time we come in the house through the garage. Which is just about every time we enter the house. It actually doesn't look too bad in this picture, it was cleaned up last week. At one time this served well for 7 people with their coats and hats and shoes and whatnot. Everyone was assigned a set of hooks and a space for shoes/boots. Any additional stuff had to be cleaned and stored. I was strict about this rule as any deviation led to a mountain that quickly blocked the door and sprawled throughout the garage.  It was hard. Everyone had multiple pair of shoes, more than one sweatshirt and boots that dripped with slush. Mostly it worked. 

   Now that our household is down to only 3 persons the simple design has become a collecting ground of coats, shoes, discarded hats, shopping bags and a packaged smoke detector. Where did that come from? What happened? How could this have worked for 7 people and be impossible for 3? I know that some of the other places we used in our house were repurposed and as a result, more stuff moved here. That and where we used to store the adult shoes was converted to a place to store outdoor activity stuff. So what to do? What do I usually do? Prowl the storage isles of stores, flip through magazines and watch a few home design shows while walking on the treadmill at the gym. I would look for inspiration, then repurpose, reuse and redesign to something that worked more easily for our current family needs.

   And then I saw it. A show on HGTV (I won't mention the name of the show) that was creating a new design for a mud room where the family was having the same issue we were with coats and shoes and all the stuff. I watched with great interest as they reviewed bins and baskets and floor covering. Okay, I wasn't going as far as floor covering, my coats and shoes are in the garage for heavens sakes. They looked at cabinet options and a storage unit way above my price level, but that was okay. Then they put together this cheerful, bright and tidy mudroom. It even had wording added to the wall that read Home Sweet Home, or some other smarmy saying. Everyone was happy.

   Except me. I was frowning. Something was very wrong. In all this neat and orderly space with a coat and a scarf here and there, there were only three pair of shoes. Where did all the shoes go? At the beginning of the episode, they had a huge pile of shoes! There had been laughter about how they were always tripping over the shoes that mom and dad and four kid piled up by the door. In this newly designed space there were no shoe bins or shoe racks. There was no cabinet with a door to hide the shoes in. It was not a huge space, so there certainly was no part of the room not covered by cameras. What did they do with the shoes?

   Then it hit me. The HGTV program had stolen all of the shoes that the family owned, except for the two pair of nice boots that were mom's and a pair of tennis shoes that probably belonged to the daughter. This whole family had been rendered barefoot in a single episode of design make over! And everyone was smiling! Did mom not know that her sons could no longer take gym and would flunk PE because they had no gym shoes? Was dad okay going to his office job barefoot? Where had all the flip flops and dress shoes gone? With all the complimenting and hugging going on, I was beginning to suspect that the family had been drugged while all their shoes had been taken away in a white van to be sold on the black market to fund the program's next make over project.

   This wasn't going to do at all for my family! My husband has enough shoes to be related to the Marcos. And my daughter and I are true women and cannot possibly survive with a pair of boots and tennis shoes between us. I had to do something, and I had to do something fast, before this program found us and stole all our shoes too!

   I knew this wasn't going to be easy. My budget was small (actually, nonexistent). Shoe racks and storage don't usually work for men's shoes. My previous experiment with baskets had proven to be a failure for scarves and hats and mittens. So I started with pairing down. What shoes did my daughter own that did not actually fit? Did my husband really need three pair of yard shoes? Could I give up the high heels that I can no longer wear due to a drop foot and a collapsed arch? Shouldn't the grocery bags be in the back of the car? Whose smoke detector was that? All ours were in place with freshly tested batteries. I checked.

   I know this is only a start. Hopefully I can happily blog about my progress and show a picture of our newly redesigned space sometime soon.  In the meantime, I am keeping an eye on the street and watching out for any prowling design trucks that might be related to a TV show. After I finish weeding through the shoes we don't need, I will be guarding our remaining stash of beloved shoes and finding a way to properly store them so that we won't be forced to live barefoot in the ever changing Chicago weather. I warn any room designers, I have my B-B Gun stashed behind the door and I am not afraid to use it!