5 Ways to Organize Your Home for Back to School

Back-to-school season has a way of changing the rhythm of the entire house. Suddenly, mornings are earlier, backpacks are everywhere, snacks disappear faster than you can stock them, and there always seems to be another load of laundry waiting.

While you can’t organize your way out of a busy schedule, you can create a home that makes that schedule easier to manage.

The key is to focus on the spaces your family uses most throughout the school week and create simple systems that remove some of those little everyday decisions. Where does the backpack go? Where are the shoes? What can the kids grab for a snack? Where did we put the extra pencils?

Here are five places to start.

1. Reset Your Entryway

The entryway is one of the hardest-working spaces in a home during the school year. It’s where backpacks get dropped, shoes come off, jackets pile up, and everything you need on the way out the door somehow seems to disappear.

Instead of fighting the drop zone, create one intentionally.

Give each family member a designated place for the things they regularly bring in and out of the house. Depending on your space, that could mean hooks for backpacks and jackets, baskets for smaller accessories, or designated shelves and bins for everyday shoes.

The easier the system is to use the second someone walks through the door, the more likely everyone is to actually maintain it.

Horderly Tip: Keep frequently used items at an easy-to-reach height and move occasional or seasonal items elsewhere. Prime storage space should go to the things your family reaches for every day.

2. Make Shoes Easy to Grab

If the school-morning question is always, “Where are your shoes?” this is one system worth tackling.

Create a designated home for the shoes your family wears most often. A shoe shelf, cubby, basket, or other contained storage near your entryway can keep pairs together and prevent them from taking over the floor.

You don’t necessarily need every pair of shoes your family owns stored by the door, either. Keep everyday sneakers, school shoes, and other frequently worn pairs accessible, then store special-occasion or out-of-season shoes elsewhere.

The goal is simple: when it’s time to leave, everyone knows exactly where to look.

3. Create an After-School Snack Zone

Hungry kids + an unorganized pantry can quickly turn into a lot of rummaging.

Creating a designated snack zone gives kids an easy place to find what they’re looking for without having to dig through the entire kitchen.

Use clear pantry bins or drawer organizers to group grab-and-go snacks together and keep them within easy reach. You can separate categories based on what makes sense for your family—bars, crackers, fruit snacks, lunchbox items, and so on.

It can also make packing lunches easier. Instead of searching several different cabinets every morning, the essentials are already grouped together and ready to grab.

Bonus: When you can clearly see what’s left, it’s much easier to know what actually needs to go on the grocery list.

4. Give School Supplies a Home

Pencils on the counter. Markers in the playroom. Scissors… somewhere?

School and homework supplies tend to migrate around the house when they don’t have a designated place to return to.

Choose one accessible area for the supplies your kids regularly need and use drawer organizers or small bins to separate them into simple categories. Think pencils, pens, crayons, markers, scissors, glue, and other homework essentials.

Avoid making the categories overly complicated. A system kids can understand and reset themselves is far more useful than one that requires an adult to reorganize it every week.

When homework time rolls around, everything they need is already waiting in one place.

5. Set Up a Laundry System

Back-to-school also means getting back into the seemingly endless cycle of school clothes, sports uniforms, gym clothes, and extracurricular gear.

A few small changes can make laundry easier to keep moving throughout the week.

Start by placing hampers where clothes actually come off rather than where you wish they would. If your kids change in their bedrooms, for example, keeping a hamper nearby makes it much more likely that clothes will end up there instead of on the floor.

Then think through the rest of the process. Can kids easily access their everyday clothes? Is there a designated place for sports uniforms or other items that need to be washed frequently? Can they help put clean clothing away?

The fewer steps your laundry system requires, the easier it becomes for everyone to participate.

Create Systems for Your Real Routine

Getting organized for back to school doesn’t mean overhauling your entire home before the first bell rings.

Start with the places where your family experiences the most friction.

If everyone is scrambling to find shoes in the morning, tackle the entryway. If packing lunches takes forever, start with the pantry. If homework supplies cover the kitchen table every night, give them a designated home.

The best organizing systems aren’t just beautiful. They make everyday routines easier to navigate and simple enough for the whole family to maintain.

And when everything has a place, there’s a little less to think about during an already busy season.

Ready to get your home organized for the school year? Horderly can create functional systems tailored to your home, your routines, and the way your family actually lives. Get started with Horderly today.