Want to make a huge leap in keeping your home cleaner? It’s easy, just take your shoes off when you walk get home.
Leaving your Nikes by the door will track less dirt onto your floors and rugs, so you’ll spend less time cleaning and have more time for more important things.
(Like shoe shopping. Recycla has red ballet flats on her mind.)
Furthermore, taking off your shoes cuts down on the germs you bring into your home, which is especially important if you have a baby crawling around and communing with your Marmoleum.
In Recycla’s house, she has successfully trained Mr. Recycla to put his shoes in the hall closet when he comes home and has about a 60% success rate with her daughters. She hopes to eventually never find sneakers under the kitchen table and sandals scattered in the hallway, but she’s afraid to set her hopes so high.
(And if only she could get the whole family to put their shoes in the closet neatly…)
Recycla’s children’s friends know to take their shoes off when they come over and even have a place of their own to leave their Chuck Taylors and Sketchers near the front door.
(Plus it makes end-of-playdate shoe retrieval a snap.)
Doing all this means that Recycla usually only has to sweep and mop her floors and vacuum her rugs once or twice a week.
Tell the Eco Women: Do you take your shoes off when you walk in the door? If you don’t, why not?
All images of cute red shoes courtesy of Zappos.com.
No shoes on in our house! Dirt road + gravel drive + barely landscaped yard + hardwood floors + shoes = a mess I’m not willing to clean up every day.
Now if I could just train my husband not to leave them in the middle of the floor (typically either right in front of the door, or in the middle of the doorway to the kitchen. Yeah, trip hazard). I’m considering hiding them when he does. Maybe that’ll learn him. My 3 year old has no problem getting them off to the side in the shoe area.
Of course I do! I’m Canadian.
http://www.howtospotacanadian.ca/2009/01/they-take-their-shoes-off-indoors.html
I have been doing this since graduating nursing school in 1985! As part of one of our clinical days, we worked in a nursing home, then came back to the microbiology lab, and cultured a swab from the bottom of our nursing shoes. Suffice to say, that “cured” me of ever, and I mean EVER walking into my house with my shoes on! And this carried forth to any shoe I wore—and since my then boyfriend/now husband worked in a dirty field (building elevators) it was kind of easy to get him to leave his shoes at the door. When we had kids, I knew it would get harder, but once you get into the habit, it’s not so bad. What is hard, and somewhat embarrassing (at least to me) is getting everyone that comes over, to leave their shoes at the door. When my sons hit teen years (heck even jr. high years) they were highly embarrassed that mom had this rule—but I perservered, and no one walks in my house with their shoes on!
Very true, about keeping carpets clean, in fact, I have cream colored carpets, hardwood floors, and tile, and they are very rarely grungy-dirty. More dusty. In the winter, when we wear white socks, I get confirmation that I am doing the right thing, because when we look at the bottom of our socks, they are not dirty/dingy.
I highly recommend this method of keeping house. I have never regretted taking the hard road of “no shoes in the house”, I feel very comfortable walking around in my bare feet, knowing I’m not tracking in the outside ick/dirt/dog poop/car grease/etc, into my house, and into my bed at night! I also keep crocs by every door entrance, or flip flops in the summer. As much as I’m in and out of my house, this has also been a tip that has saved me from falling out of the no shoes in the house habit!
A few ideas—install cream colored carpets where you have carpeting, this helps in the explanation to people who come over and give you “the look” about taking their shoes off. Institute a “new carpet/no shoes EVER” policy, and you will not have that cringe factor over going bare foot on top of ick in the carpet.
We all take our shoes off at the door. We go barefoot with the option of wearing slippers when it turns cold.
Shoeless here–we’re Dutch that way;)
I take off my shoes but my husband doesn’t like to go barefoot.
Go for the top pair of shoes!
Jenny
I have gardening-only shoes that never come inside, but we wear shoes indoors. Usually, though, we change out of our nice shoes and put on flip-flops or slippers. I love to go barefoot, but I don’t want to have to wash my feet every night before I go to bed and I don’t want a lot of dirt 5’5″ down from the top of my sheets.
We have cats who shed like banshees (and my hair is falling out in clumps thank you depakote), so it’s not like the floors would be sparkling, ready to eat off anyhow.