Back to School: Creating and Organizing a Drop Zone

Do you cringe at the thought of the after school chaos of backpacks, shoes and papers? Creating a drop zone for back to school will save your sanity!

The first day of school is quickly approaching for us and I am on a mission to get our drop zone ready for the first day of school. I am so glad that when we (re)built our house, I thought to have a mud bench added to our laundry room. However, if you don’t have a mud bench, no worries! You can still create an efficient drop zone in your home too! 

 

Create and Organize your own Drop Zone

We have two drop zones in our laundry room…a main drop zone which is our mud bench and a secondary drop zone that we use for overflow. In this post, I wanted to show you that even if you don’t necessarily have a built in drop zone, you can still create one with just a little bit of wall space and a few organizational pieces. 

Hooks

The first thing you need are some hooks. Our mud bench originally had double prong hooks that worked ok but I found that after hanging the backpacks, lunch boxes and jackets that the “lockers” looked like they were busting at the seams. I ended up switching them out for a 3 prong hook style similar to this one. The three prong hooks work much better and keep the bulky look down to a minimum. 

 

 

Baskets or Bins

Another item that is useful for a drop zone is baskets. I found some short baskets at HomeGoods that fit perfectly in the little cubbies (similar here) below our lockers and work great for shoes. If you are creating a drop zone from scratch, you can use one larger basket for everyone’s shoes (to save space if needed) or smaller baskets if you want each person to have their own place for their shoes. A boot tray would also work great for shoes.

Up above our lockers is more storage. Since they are so high up, I use the basic canvas bins and store seasonal items like scarves, hats & gloves.

Having another basket or two to serve as a catch all for all of those papers that come home from school is a definite must! I have one for school papers and one for school library books (because we don’t want to lose those and have to pay the fines!) 

 

So as you can see, it doesn’t take much to create a drop zone in your home. Just having a place for everything can make your life so much easier and you no longer have to cringe at the thought of the back to school aftermath.