Household Tip # 2: Socks!

My Solution:

We have socks everywhere (dirty and clean) tucked into crevices in the house that would take an archaeologist to dig up and retrieve them. Sometimes, I find myself picking up socks that have been discarded in the yard, or in the van, or even at a neighbor's house.

In order to reign in the sock distribution we have tried to limit the variety and the number of socks my kids possess. I went through my kids room, dumped all the socks in the middle of the floor and sorted through them. We threw out all socks that had holes in them, all socks whose match was beyond an archaeologist discovery and gave away all socks that were never worn. I then went to Wal-Mart and bought three bags of girls white socks, all the same size, (I can do this because my three girls are close in age and size), with 10 pairs of socks in each bag. We then dumped them into a bin in their closet. The benefit to this is that I no longer have to pair the socks up or divide them by child but I'm still picking up socks throughout the neighborhood but this time they are always white.

The Ottoman Solution:

I have a friend who has a beautiful black leather ottoman in her living room. When I commented on it recently, in a sly whisper she said, "It's hollow and all my mismatched socks are in it!" I thought this was a great idea to find a concealing spot for these mismatched runaways located where everyone in the family can easily get at it.

The Mesh-Bag Solution:

"Give every member of the family two mesh bags to keep in their sock drawer--one for clean socks, the other for dirty ones. When the socks come off at the end of the day, they go into the dirty sock bag, which gets washed and dried on laundry day with the socks in it. It then goes directly into the sock drawer and becomes the clean sock bag. No more sorting, matching, or losing socks, or wondering who they belong to."

Simplify your Life with Kids, by Elaine St. James