How to Organize A Mud Room - Refining the Chaos

Our mud room is probably the busiest room in our house (and that’s during a year where we’ve stayed home more than ever!). Between the coats, shoes, winter gear, purses and wallets, and now masks, there are a lot of moving parts. So naturally this is a room where we need great systems to not only get us organized now, but also keep us organized in the future. Here’s how I did that in our house…

My Process

1. Prioritize

The first step to any organizational project should be to declutter. If you can comfortably sell or give away some of your items, DO IT!

But if you’re not quite ready to part with your stuff, consider prioritizing it. Identify your favorite or most used item in each category, and make that available, while keeping the other items in a “back-up” space.

Shoes

I prefer to keep my house shoe-free, which means that most of the shoes need to be stored by the door. Our space can only hold a few pairs of shoes per person, though, so we just keep the pairs we wear the most in our mud room, while the others live in our coat closet or bedroom closet. Our favorite pairs change over time and with the seasons, though, so every once in a while I just need to go through and re-prioritize.

Winter Gear

In this recent project I realized we were keeping ALL of our hats and gloves on the main shelf, and it was too much to look at on a daily basis. So I prioritized: I chose the BEST winter gear to stay on the shelf for easy access (1-2 hats & 1-2 pairs of gloves per person), and the rest of it went into the cabinet above.

2. Be Realistic

The very nature of a mud room is that items are constantly moving in and out of it, so we need to organize in anticipation of this.

The Little Things

I used to get frustrated by all of the little items that Cooper would take out of his pockets and drop in the mud room or by the door. But I recently realized that men don’t have the luxury of a purse to hide those small items, like spare change chapstick, important receipts, etc. (WOW—I didn’t think it was possible to love purses more until I realized they also act as a storage system within the home, and not just outside of it. Kudos to you, purses.) Anyways, since then I’ve learned that, instead of nagging him to put those things all-the-way away every day, which isn’t realistic, we need to have a space for everyday in-and-out items. Luckily, I was able to use one of the compartments in our YouCopia Crazy Susans just for that.

Mail

Another example of this: mail and papers – one of the most dreaded organizational items! One of the reasons it seems so daunting is that it’s simply not realistic to go through your mail and papers at the same rate in which they arrive – everyday. The good news is this: you can leave some papers sitting for a bit and still be organized about it. I like to drop them in a designated space when I walk through door, and I go through them on a more realistic basis (i.e. weekly).

3. Adapt

Masks

As your life continually changes, your system needs to, too. One of the biggest changes to our mud room operations this year was the addition of FACE MASKS. We need to remember to bring a clean mask as we’re walking out the door, and we need a place to set our dirty masks as we’re walking back in.

When we first started needing a mask system, I used paper bags – one labeled “clean masks” and one labeled “dirty masks.” It didn’t look pretty and perfect, but I’m so glad I did it this way, because it allowed me to test my system before buying products for it. I learned that we need to have separate compartments for each person’s clean masks (because Cooper and I need different sizes and have different styles), but all of the dirty masks can just go in one container. And now I have the right products to support our system.

My Products

Here are the products I am currently using to keep our mud room organized. Many of them look like they are marketed for use in the kitchen or pantry, but I think they work wonderfully in a mud room as well.