Episode 60 – Keeping your Hallway Organised & Decluttered

In this podcast, we talk all about how to organise your entrance hall. When you walk through the door after a busy day, the last thing you want is to be welcomed by mounds of clutter, but hallways are notorious clutter magnets. It's important to keep on top of daily and weekly routines to keep the clutter at bay. Organise your entrance hall - it is vital for your sanity!
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Transcript of this podcast episode
Intro  0:07  
Welcome to today's episode of the declutter hub podcast, your channel for super easy, no nonsense advice on how to declutter and organise your home. Please welcome your host professional organisers, Ingrid Jansen and Lesley Spellman. 

Ingrid  0:23  
Hello and welcome listeners to Episode 60 of the declutter hub Podcast. I'm Ingrid and I'm Lesley. If you have clutter and want to sorted out, this is the show for you, as well as the free resources on our declutter hub.com website like the podcast, checklists and guest blogs. We also have an exclusive area where we got our members step by step to declutter their homes, we realise this can be very overwhelming. So we're there every step of the way with courses live q&a and a community discussion. Take a look on members dot declutter hub.com. In today's episode, Lesley and I will be talking about how to declutter and organise your hallway. So you can come home to the hallway of your dreams. We're talking about the visible clutter you see in hallways, not hallway cupboards, everything gets dumped in the hallway. And before you know it, you're stepping over shoes, coats and other random stuff every time you come in. Now, Lesley, hallways are a magnet for clutter on they

Lesley  1:25  
definitely, you know, say I was thinking about it when we talked about doing this podcast, because it's one of the most requested things that we get, isn't it? So you know, whether that's in our members area, and we're asking like, what do you want us to write a course on or something like that? Or requests for podcasts? People always like do what about hallways Do you want about hallways and the quite a tricky thing to discuss, really, because everyone's hallways definitely come in all different shapes and sizes down there with lots of different types of storage areas and storage solutions and things like that. So as you said in the beginning, what we're talking about now, we're not talking about Understairs cupboards, because obviously that's an integral part of many people's hallways. We're talking very much just about the entryway really, aren't we?

Ingrid  2:05  
Yes, I can't wait to do this podcast because my hallway is tiny as well. And I always have a bit of hallway envy when I go in other people's houses, and they've got this really nice hallway. And I'm like, Oh, I wish I had a hallway like

Lesley  2:19  
that. Because I think the important thing is, as soon as you walk into your home, if there's loads and loads of visible clutter, as soon as you walk in, it's a little bit soul destroying, isn't it, you already on a little bit of a downer before you even go into your house. So it's really important to try and keep that under control if you can,

Ingrid  2:37  
if you open a door, and you have to kind of climb over things. And you're you've already got your hands full of stuff with stuff you've carried from the car or from work or from picking up the kids from school and you kind of immediately see all this clutter around. You're like, ah, oh gosh, you know, I can really imagine that it really sets people off kind of gone. Oh, no,

Lesley  2:58  
exactly. And you say something very interested in that, which is that we tend to enter our hallways when we're really, really tired. So it's going to be at the end of something, it's going to be at the end of a journey with the kids, it's going to be the end of a workday, it's going to be when we come in from a night out. And so generally, quite often when we arrive home, we're kind of tired. Not always, but often. And that's a really important factor in the way that we actually deal with our hallways, isn't it because we're so tired, that we've not got the energy to do what we need to do when we come in to keep them in tip top condition. Really? I think that's the point. Yeah,

Ingrid  3:29  
I think you're right, we open the door, we kind of plunk stuff down. And we kind of think I'll do that later I'll get around to it. Well, let me first sit down, have a cup of tea, or whatever, then you get sidetracked by other things that happen in life. And then it all it kind of gets worse, worse and worse, doesn't it.

Lesley  3:45  
So those emotions and habits are big, aren't they in hallways in terms of our emotional well being when we walk in the door, making sure that our homes are inviting places to be. Procrastination is absolutely prevalent in halls, hallways, because we're tired, we walk through the door, and we'll do something later. So those are the two main things aren't involved in hallways. So you

Ingrid  4:05  
also it's not only your own clutter that you see and that you feel worried about. But you also think about what other people feel about your house when they see a very cluttered hallway. If it's a neighbour or a friend coming around. If your hallway is messy, then you might worry about how they feel about you and the rest of your house and you want your house to be inviting for other people to come around. I think that's really important as well.

Lesley  4:32  
Yeah. And that's a really key emotion, isn't it in decluttering most people who've lived a cluttered life or have clutter in their homes, you albeit temporarily, have been judged. And so that's a big thing that we see, you know, people feel judged all the time by the state of their homes. So that's why it's really important to try and get the first impression to other people, right if you can, so that takes away that judgement from other people. It's not right that people are judging you. But if you can do something to avoid that, and that's going to make you feel a little bit better. It's kind of a trick And then the next thing really, isn't it?

Ingrid  5:01  
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Lesley  5:03  
There was one other thing that I wanted to talk about in terms of our habit. With hallways, there's this strange thing. And we all do it don't wait, which is we put things in hallways, which is on the way out of the home, to remind us to do jobs. So whether that's letters to posts, whether it's dry cleaning to do, whether it's school letters to take back to school, that kind of thing, what we do is we also put those things in our hallways to remind us to do something with them. But then what happens is, it becomes part of the furniture, we don't see any more. So what we intend to be a visual reminder, no longer is. And then it becomes clutter, because we don't do what we're supposed to do with the stuff because we don't see it anymore, because it's part of the rest of the clutter. So if that's happening to you, and those visual reminders are not working, which to be fair, that is a big part of what we see, isn't it in hallways, when we're working with people, that there are a lot of outstanding choice still sitting in hallways, and so, so they don't work, the visual reminders don't work, you've got to find a different way of doing that. Whether that's a written list, whether it's an email list, whether it's reminder on your phone, now people use voice reminders as loads and loads of different things to remind you to do those things. So putting things in hallways is not always the best way. But it's a very, very common way.

Ingrid  6:20  
Yes, absolutely. Plastic bags with shoes to go to the cobblers library books being buried under coats and scarves and hats. I mean, you name it. We found it in hallways, haven't we. So we've seen this every day with our clients. And the hallway has a massive impact of people coming into your home. But also when you want to leave in the morning, trying to find something and trying to get ready. It's really important to have that hallway decluttered and organised.

Lesley  6:47  
Definitely. I think that takes us nicely on to decluttering. Really, because this is an interesting one, because actually, in my opinion decluttering is not the main thing that needs to be done in hallways, it's much more about routines and habits and tidying up than it is decluttering. I'm not saying you never do any decluttering in a hallway. But what I am saying is mostly it's about putting things away, would you agree and good. Of course,

Ingrid  7:13  
when you tidy up a hallway for the first time, if you haven't tidied up in a long time, you will definitely find items there that you think, oh my goodness, what is this doing it? This should have been dealt with or done or returned or whatever. But if you then keep on top of things, then it will much more become a routine and habits.

Lesley  7:34  
Yeah, and the interesting thing is as well, in order to be able to tidy things away, the rest of your house has to be categorised and organised. I think it's always interesting when we go to clients, people, when we say well, where would you like to start people tend to want to start in those areas that are going to be seen by other people. And so hallways and lounges and living rooms are the ones that people always want to start. And when in actual fact we know as organisers that's not the most efficient way of doing things, the more efficient way of doing things is to create space in the rest of the house where there are storage options around to put the things that are in the lounge and in the hallway away, what you'll find is that hallways quite a difficult place to work with because you've not already designated a place for everything. And then we can put everything in its place. And so it's an interesting one, isn't it because you'll find a lot of unfinished business if you start with your hallway. So even though it's really important, and people want to do that, because of the impact that it has on other people and how they judge and I completely get that, actually, there's a much more efficient way of doing things I do

Ingrid  8:35  
tidy up on a very regular basis. And I have kind of two moments in the year when I kind of do a tidy routine decluttering job and it's when I soak my coats for the winter and then back in the autumn for this or in the spring for the summer. So that's my time when I sort some stuff out and I kind of sought out my hallway and because I do that on a regular basis all the time and I've got that routine. I can keep track of everything that's in my hallway because it looks much neater, it doesn't become a dumping ground. So if

Lesley  9:07  
you were going to declutter things if you're going to do a decluttering project in a hallway, how would you go about that?

Ingrid  9:13  
Well, I would first start with categorising the items. So I would put the coats together. And either by person or by season, depending on what's in there. Then I would put hats and scarves and gloves together. I would make a pile with summer things. So sunglasses suncream baseball hats, things like that that you use over the summer. And I would probably gather all the paper together anything post that has gone random in your hallway. And then you probably have an umbrella collection that you can put together and things like bags and plastic bags, so I would categorise them. And then through each category I would sort it through Oh, and go right. What of this stuff is actually still current? What are we using? What is either been outgrown or has been overused and needs to be recycled? Or what is rubbish needs to be thrown away? What can be recycled? So, I will do per category because I think it's better. If you have a lot of coats, you might want to go ahead and go right, what's the upcoming season and take out your, for example here two weeks ago, it's we're on going into winter now. So now the summer coats are being taken out, they're being put in the wash. So that's my system, so I don't leave them year round on my code rack, I take on I've only got the codes that are for the right season. So rain jackets, winter coats. And then in the spring, of course, I've got my summer jackets out, and I make sure a dry cleaner wash my winter coats. So that's how I do it.

Lesley  10:55  
Talking about coats. And I've got an interesting question for you in good. What do you think about coat stones,

Ingrid  11:00  
I if it's a small hole, I would definitely if you can put a coat rack on something on the wall, preferably something that has if you really tight on space, I would say take something with a shelf. So you can put a basket or one or two baskets on top. If you have a really large hallway, I think then you can go for a coat stand, because then you can actually walk around the coat stand and grab the jackets. But if you got a tiny hallway, I think a loose coat stand is not preferable. I would rather do something hooks on the wall. If it gets small children, I would also say have lower hooks on the lower part of the wall so the children can put their coats on the coat rack or the coat hooks themselves. So it's not as soon as they can kind of open and close their coat and put their coat back on. They can also take it off the hook and put it on and put it back when they come back in. So they don't drop it on the floor all the time. So I have actually here I've hosted are lower, and I've got hooks that are higher for the adults.

Lesley  12:00  
So you're the kind of professional organiser, Ingrid. So my answer to my own question was, I absolutely hate with a passion coaster. And the reason why, you know I do talk about hates, which is quite a strong word, I guess. But because all they become so you see them in the shops, and they look beautiful. They're pieces of art, really, they're almost like sculptures, sometimes some of them are anyway. So that there are named Victorian or the modern and cool and so on. But actually what they become is just this mound of coats. So the only time that a coat stand to me works is for people coming in. Yes, guests coming in to put the to hang their coats up, not for family coats. And I know not everyone's got the option to do that. I know that but I suppose what I'm saying is preferably go for as Ingrid has said, a coat rack with hooks side by side on the wall and get as many hooks in there as you possibly can. If you can get them on two levels, then that's even better. That a coat stand is definitely something to steer clear of if you're more of a messy person or if you've got loads and loads of coats because they just don't work over Yeah, and they just don't look good. Once you've put more than two or three coats on a coat stand. It does not like not look like a beautiful coat stand.

Ingrid  13:18  
That is true. That is true. Maybe I've never I've never had a whole way to actually have a coach that Mo was a Bozeman tiny. So I'm like, Oh, if I ever get a big house, I'm gonna get goats.

Lesley  13:31  
I mean, I suppose I might, you know, and I've got I mean I've got in my hall. I mean I've got quite a nice big hallways to be fair, and that it's got like a front end which is quite clear. And then I've got the back part of the hallway, which has got one of those Victorian coats done so it's still quite flat and not a round one, but that gets full of coats as well. But I spend my time taking those cuts and putting them elsewhere but I'm looking I am looking you know that I'm looking for the space that I've got, because I've got multiple places to put coats. I can put them in wardrobes. I've got a room at the back and so on. But my one big bugbear my huge bugbear is people putting coats on bannisters is like the go on the bannister. And so but we all do it don't we? I mean my in my house I'm like you can put them there. They're there and they're you've chosen to put them on the bannister why is that? Why me up I'm not gonna lie. So anyway, so yeah, coast downs. They look beautiful in the shop. They look like a great idea but actually standard straightforward hooks on the wall and much better.

Ingrid  14:34  
So do how do you what have you got a routine there? Lesley, do you also swap your summer in winter coats and do you tidy it away like I do or how does it work in your house then?

Lesley  14:45  
Yeah, I mean in my so I've got I've got a kind of as I said, I've got a couple of places that I can put coats really. So I've got like a back utility room which has got a lot of coat storage. And then I've got my kind of hallway one which I want to keep quite clear. So that's where all Lunch shoes get kicked off when they come in the house. And that's where the coats come. But what happens on there is, as I'm tidying the kitchen, if people have left a random hoodie around that will get put on the coat stand. When people come in from football, those kinds of things get. So over the course of the week, there's a lot of different coats that go on there. So and I used to do this much more regularly when all the kids were at home. But now there's only really me and Nathan and my husband, so probably once a week, then I will go through those coats. And I'll take out the ones that I don't want on there to leave four or five on their max. Does that make sense? And so yeah, definitely, once a week, I'm trying to avoid that huge amount of coats situation because they can just build up, can't they?

Ingrid  15:40  
Yeah, definitely, I tried to kind of have a rain little rain jacket, kind of the hoodie. And then they're either their summer or the winter go to this kind of the year round things for me as well, a rain jacket, a summer coat, and maybe you can have a nice coat and then now it's being swapped over for a winter coat. But the rain coat stays, I have a wardrobe upstairs where I actually put the summer or the winter coats depending on the season. And because we do tend because we

Lesley  16:06  
do tend to have coats that we were really regularly dealt with. And each season that we put on that we just stick on every day, and most people do in the family and then you've got other coats that you might pull on for special occasions or for specific things. And so it is there is definitely that 2080 rule isn't that with coats for good reason, really. So yeah, but you do need to have a routine to keep those coats under control. And to move things around. Not many people can keep all of the coats for the whole family in the hallway.

Ingrid  16:33  
No, definitely not. And especially if you're very limited on space, I would say keep only your daily used coats there. And everything that you don't wear on a regular basis needs to live somewhere else. Because if you're a family of four, or five, or maybe even six, and you've got so much going on in the hallway, and you might also need a place for the school backpack or, and maybe the pair of daily shoes. If you've got lots of everything going on, then immediately it becomes so messy. And then it's easier just to dump stuff and it becomes a dumping ground doesn't it?

Lesley  17:05  
It does you know what I'm we're never ever going to achieve that magazine, we're the hallway that we see, you know, there's a hallway and they've got one coat hanger, you know, and one little pair of shoes and a little backpack on a cute little hook. That's not real life is it real life is got however many kids, we've got all these things, they're kicking the shoes off this train is this plimsolls there's loads and loads of stuff isn't there and all these different curves and keeping it under control is quite the job really, you know, we want those things in our hallway to be two hands in the morning, particularly if you've got young kids and you've got to get them out to school. And so we did another podcast in about a command centre. So this is not a command centre in the kitchen. I think we spoke about in that podcast sometimes that command centre, which is a bit of a fancy word really, but it's a kind of action station almost a place that you grab things that you're going to need regularly then that's often in our hallway, especially in the winter, when it's hats and scarves and football kits and dancing kits and dancing shoes, swimming kits. And all those things, if you haven't got the benefit of an Understairs cupboard might often be in some hawks or in some boxes or some storage in your hallway.

Ingrid  18:09  
Very true. I always make sure that my sports equipment is upstairs because my hallway is not big enough. And I don't want to put it in my in my downstairs cupboard because I've got other stuff that's more important in my opinion. So swim kit and dance kit and cheerleading kits and all those things live upstairs in his designated area where everybody can find it. And where it's easy. When it's dry, it gets put in back in there. And when it comes back in, I make sure it goes into the wash. And I think for me how you have got such a thing about coats senselessly. For me, I think it's very important that coats get washed at the end of the season. Even if you're going to give them away to other people, you need to wash them first, if you're gonna give them away to the charity shop, give them a wash, and then give them away. And then also at that time, as soon as it's clean, have a look at the size, will this be able to fit next year, if you know it was already on the tight side, they're not going to get us next year, that immediate goes into the charity shop. But if I see, so many people want to clear out their hallways and the sleeves are really dirty that haven't been washed at all. I think it's really important that you wash your coach and after a whole season.

Lesley  19:20  
It's definitely something that gets neglected, isn't it? And in terms of organisation, I think one of the key things to do in a hallway if you've got the possibility and as we said right at the beginning of the podcast, hallways definitely come in all different shapes and sizes. If you can get covered storage, like Ottomans boxes, things that you can put stuff into where it's a little bit contained and covered. That's going to be better but you sometimes you have to compromise on accessibility. So it's what's important is is it more important for things to be accessible, or is it more important to you that things look nice and tidy? You know, hallways are all about compromise. For most people. First of all, more than anything else. What you need to do is Need to make sure you've got that routine, where you're going through that hallway, and you're putting things away on a very, very regular basis. The other thing, the last thing that I wanted to say really about hallways is that I do have in my hallway, a basket to put things away into. So if I find things in my house that belong elsewhere in the house, that quite often people have got stare baskets, mine's not a stair basket, because stair baskets are not that big. So mine's a basket where I'll put things in, and it might be shoes that are gonna go upstairs, it might be something that needs to go in the washing basket upstairs, it could be anything in there, it could be a lipstick that came out of my handbag that I no longer need, it could be a pair of earrings that I took off on the work surface, all go in the basket. And then with regularity, the stuff out of that basket gets taken to the room that it belongs. And so that's another thing that you can do that definitely definitely helps with the clutter. And so if my kids then come to me and said, Mom, where's this? Well, it's either in your room, or it's in the basket, because that's the way you know, we're reasonably meticulous, as you might expect, of a professional organiser. So there's only two places that it can be, if I've tidied my kitchen, then it's either going to be in that basket waiting to go upstairs, or it's going to be upstairs in your room, incorporating a stair basket or some kind of container to collect things that have been misplaced is also a really, really useful thing to have in your hallway. Yeah,

Ingrid  21:14  
on that note, I think what I really want to say, share with our listeners, don't put it down, put it away. When you come in, even if you're tired, hang up your coat immediately. Place your shoes where you want your shoes to live, pick up the poles from the mat and put it on the desk, if that's where you normally do your poster, read your post or bring it into the kitchen or wherever you open your post. So don't wait for it. And then 11 o'clock at night, you want to close the front door. And you're like, oh my gosh, I haven't even gotten around to putting my code on the right hook. And then in the morning, it's a scramble, because you can't find things because things haven't been put back in the right place. So if it takes less than a minute or a minute or two to do, do it there and then and not leave it till later. Because then you leave a trail of stuff around your house of things you're going to do later. And that's when you get the chaos going on. So that really helps in getting into a more organised way of thinking. And if you do the same thing every day, you're not being boring, you're being smart, because you're not losing time and energy and effort of hunting around for the stuff that you need to the next day. So I think systems and routines can sometimes sound very boring, but for me, I think I am saving so much time this is good.

Lesley  22:36  
Absolutely, absolutely. You save so much time by spending you know you and I would talk all the time on the podcasts about reset times. And so I've got my reset times in the day where everything I have to trawl around in a boring methodical way putting things away. But it saves you so much time in the long run because a you know where everything is and it doesn't become this mammoth mammoth chore at the weekend. It's just spent 20 minutes in the morning just putting a washer on blah blah putting things away putting things in the dishwasher, all those kinds of things and they save you so much time but it can be but you need some energy and focus to decide to do that every day to me it just it's completely second nature and to many people it is but to some people it's not and you have to start to change habits gradually

Ingrid  23:21  
point very well made. Lesley is there anything else you want to add before we kind of close this podcast? Have we I think we've got everything happened we

Lesley  23:30  
did that make it clear that we shouldn't be using co stems. Yeah.

Ingrid  23:34  
Yes. You've made a second. Yeah. You hate a coach said yes. Lesley. I think our listeners realise this now.

Lesley  23:43  
Because it shouldn't be a thing of beauty but the not because it just piled high with coats, aren't they? So listen, listeners all over

Intro  23:50  
the world are going oh my gosh, I've got a coach stand. This is not good. Let's see we're thrown away when she comes to my house.

Lesley  24:00  
Stand queen. Yeah, exactly. Well,

Intro  24:03  
I remember recently you having a coach and in your thing that you actually decluttered so you've actually made good on the promise of yourself that you declutter this, so I did.

Lesley  24:12  
Yeah, but I didn't have to be fair, I did not have any fur coats. Yeah, true. It was for handbags.

Ingrid  24:18  
Yeah. Anyway, listeners, are you are you going to tidy up your hallway? Is this maybe a little weekend job? Can you maybe do a little bit this week? Are you going to be putting away your coat now on a daily basis because you are inspired by our routines and our habits? We really hope so because we hope that you learn and are inspired to take action. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen today. And if you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and tell us what you think about the show. If you'd like to get more tips and advice please follow us on social media. We are on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as at declutter hub, and we have a lovely lively supportive Facebook group where we chat all things clutter, you can search for the declutter hub community and we'd love to see you there. Take a look at members.declutterhub.com. To find out more about our membership. If you don't want to miss the next weekly episode, please subscribe to the declutter hub podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio. And it will pop into your notifications each Friday. See you next time.

Intro  25:24  
Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the declutter hub podcast. Check out declutterhub.com for more inspiration, and don't forget to tune in next week.
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