Works for Me Wednesday: Shoes Off at the Door

It's Wednesday, time for "Works for Me Wednesday", a blog carnival hosted by We Are THAT Family. To see more of this week's "Works for Me Wednesday" posts, click here.

True confession: Having something to do with the fact that I grew up in a household where shoes went on in the morning and came off at bedtime, I once thought that the "shoe free" household concept was kind of a prissy one.

Then, quite some time after becoming parents, we shampooed our carpets again and were mortified by the color of the grimy water in the tank - not to mention the amount of sweat that went into moving the furniture so that the steam cleaning could be done in the first place!

We decided then to institute a shoes-free household where shoes come off at the door, and have now done so for about 7 months. It was hard at first since neither my husband nor I had ever regularly done it - and now we had to convince our toddler that it was a good idea, too. But I am glad that we did it, and here's why:

• It's just plain cleaner, and from the standpoint of a parent of rugrats, healthier. Less dirt tracked into the house in general - cleaner carpets for my baby (we put a blanket down for her to play for now, but at some point this summer, she'll be crawling all over and harder to keep off the carpet and floors).
  
  
• It saved our socks! You can actually lay down my socks and see a timeline in the white athletic socks (which I wear most often). The "pre-shoes-off" era socks have an impermeably dingy color on the soles, while the ones from the "shoes-off" era still look essentially new in terms of whiteness. Guess which ones will probably last longer, ergo continue to enable more frugal sock-buying long-term?
  
  
• Our kids will have it as an ingrained pattern and probably do it at other people's houses as habit. And, there's a better chance that they'll grow up to do it in their own households.

We are not militant about this rule - we usually unofficially suspend it when company is around. Only our parents and other regular visitors are asked to doff their shoes, but since we as a nuclear family account for 90%+ of the traffic in the house, removing our shoes makes the biggest difference.

Taking our shoes off at the door works for me!
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