EP 53: Microsystems for Home Management

On Episode 53 of Loving Life at Home, I’m tackling another question from what may arguably be my most faithful listener of all time, who also happens to be my daughter-in-law, Rebekah Joy. She asked me to cover some of the microsystems for managing our home that my husband and I put in place to keep everything running smoothly.

Once she explained the kind of microsystems she was talking about (including several her husband/our son implemented in their home with great success) I began compiling a list and realized there are probably too many to cover in one podcast. So this week, we’ll discuss microsystems that are aimed at maintaining order in the home, then I’ll eventually do a podcast on various microsystems we’ve put in place for maintaining relationships: nurturing our marriage, raising our children, celebrating holidays, homeschooling, forging friendships, etc.

To read the full transcript of this week’s podcast, simply scroll past the show notes below.

Microsystems for Home Management

FULL TRANscript for episode 53

Are you looking for ways to strengthen your marriage? Would you like to raise children you enjoy being around? Do you long for a peaceful, orderly home that’s a blessing to everyone who comes through its doors?

Then you’ve come to the right place. I’m Jennifer Flanders, a Bible-believing, homeschooling mother to 12, and host of the Loving Life at Home podcast. Join me as we discover what God’s Word has to say about marriage, motherhood, and minding the things that matter most.

Hello, friend! Welcome to episode 53 of Loving Life at Home. I’m tackling another question from a listener today, a listener who also happens to be my daughter-in-law and is probably the most faithful listener I have, with the possible exception of my own mother. But such as it may be, Rebecca Joy asked if I would cover some of the microsystems that my husband and I have set up over the years to keep our home and family schedules running smoothly.

She noted that her husband, my son Samuel, brought a lot of these methods into their marriage, and she marvels at how helpful they’ve been. So she was intrigued to learn more and also hopefully to discover how many of the micro-systems he set up in their house are the product of his own problem-solving mind and how many he has just inherited from his parents.

I think that’s a very valid question and it certainly falls within the scope of my Titus 2 goals of teaching younger women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be keepers at home.

And so I can’t promise you that the list of microsystems I’m sharing today will be complete. That’s the funny thing about building helpful habits into your home life. They eventually become so second nature that you don’t even think about the fact that you’re doing them. But I’ll try to hit on as many as I can remember that deal with homemaking and I’ve grouped them into categories to add a little structure to the few that I could identify.

So let’s tackle home organization today, starting with the area that so many of us encounter first when we step into the house, and that’s the garage. Although right now we’re in a rent house, and we never have to go through the garage to get to the back door, but most of the houses that we’ve lived in, save for the very first apartment, we’ve entered the house through the garage.

Microsystems for the Garage:

Keeping up with your keys

And so the very first thing we want to know when we come in is, where do we put our keys? How would you like to know exactly where to find your car keys and never again be forced to hunt a misplaced set when you’re already running late for an appointment?

I could probably count on one hand the number of times in the past 30 years I’ve had to frantically search for lost keys in a panic because we designated a place for keys early on and we’ve been faithful to use it consistently. For us, that took the form of 3M hooks on a wall or inside a cabinet door just inside the garage. Or since we currently live in a house for as many members park in front as park behind our house, we have a little drawer currently that all the keys go into.

But I really prefer the hooks because then the keys are exactly in the same place every time. You don’t have to rummage around in a drawer to find them. We do try to make it easier by color-coding the keys.

We have several cars because we have several adult children that are living in this house, and each child has a certain color carabiner for their car [keys]. So for instance, my husband has green, one son has blue, another son has red, one of my daughters has pink. Anyway, when they’re on the hooks each car has two keys so they have two carabiners associated with it.

That way if somebody doesn’t put the keys back, there’s still a key available to move the car if we need to. But most of the time everybody puts their keys where they belong, and you just have to reach in and get the color carabiner for the car you’re trying to drive to be able to move it.

I don’t like the drawer method quite as well as the hook method because you do have to root around a bit to find the keys you’re looking for and you have to stop and think what color belongs to the car that you need.

Whereas with the hooks they’re always hanging in the exact same position and they’re clearly labeled. The hooks are labeled: Mom, ead, Ben, Joe, Becca and so forth. So you can see at a glance what key you need and just grab it and go.

designating a place for dirty clothes

Then another thing that we do is we also keep laundry baskets right by the back door either right inside the house in a cabinet or right outside beside the door. For many many years I kept a dark and a light basket so people could just sort the laundry in as they went.

My husband does most of the laundry today and does not usually take time to separate lights from darks, so we don’t have double baskets anymore at the doors. We just have a single basket so that as people come in if they have socks or clothes that are dirty they can just put them right there before they ever enter the house.

no shoes in the house

We also try to keep some shelving for shoes right next to the back door. We typically don’t wear our shoes into the house. It keeps the floors cleaner that way and it always helps us know exactly where the shoes are.

I have a basket by the front door for people coming in through the front door to toss their shoes into, but at the back door we just have a different shelf for each person, and they put whatever shoes they’re wearing that day on the shelf and when they come out of the door ready to leave, they grab the shoes that they want and go.

store [and sort] socks conveniently

Then another thing, since we have shoes in the garage, we used to keep the socks out there, too, so that when the kids were getting ready for church or to go to co-op or something like that. as they were putting on their shoes on the steps of the garage, they could grab their socks too.

Again, in this rent house, I don’t have a place for that little nightstand that I used for the purpose. Before the nightstand, I had a little set of just Rubbermaid drawers with a different drawer for each person’s socks.

Oh and that’s also a different microsystem, which is when we were early in our marriage, I had lots of different socks every child had multiple colors of socks in multiple styles. And my husband saw me sorting unmatched socks one night.

I had over 75 unmatched socks for two or maybe three children at the time, and he said, “This is ridiculous. We need to just get rid of all these socks, and each child will have their distinctive style socks.”

You know: crew socks or maybe all the socks will be the same, but the toes will be different colors. So one child has gray toes and one has white toes and one has pink toes and that sort of thing. Matching toes and heels on the socks made it was easy to tell which sock belonged to which child, and if somebody didn’t put it in the dirty clothes, we knew who did it because you could recognize the sock.

Anyway, those socks were kept in a drawer [in the garage] so each child had a drawer for a while we had a little stack of Rubbermaid drawers, like I said, with those socks. And [each drawer was] labeled with the children’s names. Later, we had just a really large nightstand that had divided drawers in it, so each child had a divided area in a drawer.

organizing tools

Then also, in the garage, we would have a cabinet for our tools. And I’d labeled those drawers so that if they got a hammer out or a wrench or, you know, my husband needed a tool and wanted to find it quickly, it was easy to see the labels on the drawers and know exactly where to look for a screwdriver or a wrench.

pegs for coats and swimsuits

And then hooks were also something that we’ve typically had in the garage, although right now our hooks are in a coat closet inside the house. But we put a row of hooks [outside the door to the garage] so that each child had a hook.

And when our children were little, we would go swimming every night during the summer, and so those hooks were the perfect place for them to hang their wet swimsuits so that they could dry out before the next evening when it was time to go again.

Then in the wintertime, the swimsuits were put away because we weren’t swimming in the winter, but the hooks were great for their coats. So they’d grab their coats as they went out the back door and be ready to face the cooler weather. And then, when they came in, they would just hang them on the hooks.

It was a lot easier than using hangers and kept everything neat and tidy. And again, the hooks were labeled, and so they were in order –you know– youngest to oldest, and everybody knew which peg was theirs and would put their swimsuit or their coat on the peg that belonged to them.

a hanging dowel rod for drying towels

By that same token, we had lots of wet [beach]towels when we swam every night, and so what I did for that was just to hang a long 12-foot dowel by chains from the ceiling of the garage, and the kids could just throw their towel over that towel and kind of spread it out flat and they would dry that way and be ready to go the pool again the next day.

That kept us from having to wash towels every single time we went to the swimming pool because it really was a nightly occurrence there for a long time.

an easy way to keep garage floor clean

Then another thing that really helped us keep our garage tidy was painting the floor.

My mom and dad always painted their [garage] floor, and it was usually clean enough to eat off of. I can’t say the same for mine, but it mine is pretty neat usually.

Again we’re in a rent house right now without a painted floor, and it just gets so dusty and chalky without that paint, but with the paint it’s easy to sweep out it’s easy to mop and it just looks nice and so painting the floor.

My parents used to have our birthday parties out in the garage and it didn’t really matter how big a mess we made because it was very easy cleanup.

a place to park the bikes

Also to keep the bikes neat we would have a bike rack. Now my son has built a bike rack for their bikes out of wood which just has a little slot for the front tire of each bike and keeps them upright where they don’t have to use their kickstands. And they’re all lined up ready to go next time they want to take a ride.

The one that we have used for years and years and are still using is one that my husband had custom welded for us because for a long time we had 14 bikes. We had a bunch of bikes, and so we would just line them up on that bike rack, and it kept the garage so much neater that way.

keeping sporting goods in order

Also we would put up shelving for sports equipment. Basketballs would go in one laundry basket and tennis rackets in another, and we would just line up those things on shelves, and it was easy access but also kept everything nice and tidy.

And while we’re on the topic of bikes and sports sporting equipment, we might as well talk about toys as well.

Microsystems to Help Tame the Toy Box

group toys by category

There are certainly some microsystems in place that have been in place in our family for decades now, and one of the biggest ones is toy rotation. We’ve never had a dedicated playroom, but we do have lots of experience living in tight spaces.

Our first three children were born while we were still living in a small apartment, and when my husband was in the Army Reserves, we spent four months living in a 500 sq. ft bachelor barracks with 10 children. So being able to keep things tidy was really a plus. And part of our strategy there [and everywhere we’ve lived] was to rotate the toys.

put toys you keep on rotation

We never give our kids full access to all their playthings at once. I would instead group their toys into categories: you know, Duplos, Lincoln Logs, plastic dinosaurs, matchbox cars, baby dolls, etc. And we’d keep each category in a separate box or bin stored out of our children’s reach in the top of a locked closet or on a high shelf in the garage.

The kids didn’t have free reign to access those toys. They just asked for what they wanted, then I would get it down. They’d play with it until they were tired of playing, then pick it all up before trading it out for something new.

Now limited access meant limited mess. There are lots of advantages to putting kids toys on a rotation schedule. One of the most obvious is the fact that when kids can’t reach all their toys at once, they don’t drag them all out at the same time.

So any toy mess they create is automatically smaller and easier to clean up than it might have been otherwise, and I store those toys in a way that makes cleanup as easy as possible.

Store toys with clean up in mind

I made sure each category of toys was stored in a box big enough that everything could be tossed in quickly when it came time to pick up. If the toys have to be carefully arranged like some kind of IQ puzzle to fit back into the container, you have a much too small container. And you might as well forget having the kids pick up for you.

If the toys can be tossed back into the bucket with plenty of room to spare, even toddlers can help pick up and be proud of themselves for doing so. Those big bins of Lincoln Logs and Duplos that I mentioned? Those blocks fit inside with room to spare, so everyone can help, and cleanup takes less than a minute or two.

tips for storing toys in common spaces

While most of our toys are stored up high I have always kept two round wooden boxes with pretty painted lids with an easy reach for when my children were little or now for when the grandkids come to visit.

Each of those two boxes fit under a pair of matching leather chairs in our living room, and they look pretty. But the kids know that they can play with either one of them while their parents visit. And I’ve done that since my own children were little.

They were allowed to get them out without asking permission while I was cooking dinner or napping or talking on the phone. But I would regularly rotate other toys from the top of the closet into those easy-to-access boxes every few weeks, to make sure the kids didn’t grow tired playing with just the same few things.

I probably need to do that again for my grandkids right now, because their current favorites are matchbox cars and dinosaurs, both of which could easily fit in those two boxes underneath my chairs. But I have some domino sets that they don’t play with quite as much, so I should switch those out while I’m thinking about it.

The storage looks decorative that way and I don’t mind it being visible, and it’s still really easy for the kids to quickly pick up by themselves. Depending on your style, a big picnic basket with a lid could work or a vintage suitcase or maybe even an ottoman with hidden storage would work well.

The secret is just to train your kids not to get all of [those easy-access toys] out at once and to put the things back when they’re finished playing with them.

routinely purge toy collection

Another big help to keeping the toy box tamed is to routinely purge your children’s playthings. For many of us the best way to begin organizing kids toys is by getting rid of about half of them.

Most children these days own way more toys than they will ever play with, and the excess just creates confusion and chaos and prevents them from enjoying the toys that they really do like. Plus, sometimes [the excess] makes the playroom or family den look like a tornado struck it. So clear out the clutter and toss the stuff that’s broken or missing parts.

If you need to, enlist your kids help. Depending on their ages, you may have to consult them before purging their playthings — or at least hang on to the things that you want to discard for a while, in case anything is missed or is more special than you realize.

You can put all the junky plastic stuff and the Happy Meal toys and things that they never really play with in a cardboard box and put it in the attic for a month or two. My own mother did that to me one time when my messy closet was driving her crazy. She put everything she thought should be tossed or donated into a big black trash bag and moved it to our storage room.

She told me several times that I could go through it and get out anything I wanted to keep, but I never got around to doing that, and she eventually just sent it all packing.

I was sad when I realized that several trophies and all my blue ribbons and award certificates had been in that sack, but I really can’t blame her, because she did give me ample opportunity to reclaim it. The only thing that I’d recommend doing differently than what she did is to use a box instead of a trash bag, which is a little bit easier to go through, and is also more neatly stored in the interim.

leave room for sentimentality

Allow room, though, for sentimentality — at least in moderation. Some kids (like some adults) seem deeply attached to [all] their belongings.

I suspect that they are mostly attached to the memories associated with those belongings (I know that’s definitely the case for me). When they look at that possession, it reminds them of the person who gave them the gift or the vacation they were on when they first got the item or some other significant (or not so significant) life event.

I remember going through my son’s stuffed animal collection. He was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 22 months old and spent a week at Children’s Hospital in Dallas getting things under control before he came back home.

And he came home from that week at Children’s with more stuffed animals than you could shake a stick at, because every time they came in to take a blood pressure or to take his temperature or adjust his medication or give him a shot or test his blood — every single time they came in that room — they brought him a new stuffed animal.

So he came home with so many stuffed animals — just bag fulls — and we were kind of drowning in them. So I let him keep them for a few months and then bagged them up. We were having a garage sale, and I was gonna get rid of some of the excess things we had at the house and, unbeknownst to me, there was one little yellow dog in the pile I bagged up he called his diabetic dog.

The nurses had used that dog to help him learn how to give a shot. Every time they had to give him a shot, he was able to give the little diabetic dog a shot first.

And so, my son saw that little yellow dog on the table before I opened the garage sale and started crying, “Mom, you can’t sell the diabetic dog!”

And, of course, he was so right. And I’ve been made to feel so guilty ever since that I’d even consider selling that diabetic dog! But I tried to make it up to him. I made the diabetic dog it’s own little carrying case. Then, every time my son had a pair of blue jeans that was worn out at the knee or short sets that needed to be hemmed, or anything else that needed to be altered, I would save the scraps and make the diabetic dog a little matching outfit just like my son’s clothes. So he had this little carrying case for his diabetic dog and a full wardrobe that matched his — and he still has them today — so that was obviously the right decision to keep that diabetic dog.

special toys get special treatment

So (obviously, special toys should get special treatment. If your child does have a favorite stuffed animal or a favorite doll like that, by all means let him or her hold on to that one rather than storing it away with the rest of the toys (or sending it away with charity donations or trash pickup!)

We let our daughters keep their American Girl dolls in their room for anytime play, and that firstborn son got to keep his diabetic dog with him at all times, and — oh my goodness — that thing came to the zoo with us more than once. One time, it even fell out of a monorail ride at the Dallas Zoo into an enclosure with the wild animals, and the zoo workers were so kind to go and retrieve it when they realized how special it was to my son.

I had another son who had a homemade black Zorro mask that I had made at his request for him, and, for about a year, he kept that thing in his pocket (whenever it wasn’t on his face).

And so for the time that my kids were fixated on specific toys — now they couldn’t fixate on every single toy we owned — but if there were one or two really special things like a doll or a stuffed animal, we let them keep those with them. And then, when they lost interest in them, they would be put back on rotation with the rest of the toys. The dolls would go back to the doll bucket, and the Zorro mask would go back to the costume bucket, and things like that.

choose classic, versatile toys

Whenever you’re deciding which toys to keep and which to purge, go for those toys that can be used in multiple ways:

A large scarf can be a superhero cape or a baby blanket or a sling for a broken arm or a turban or a sash — you get the idea. Similarly, blocks can be used to build cities or roads or skyscrapers or cabins or fences or pyramids.

That’s why we’re real big fans of Duplos and wooden train tracks and Lincoln Logs, and we we have a big bin of each of those still in our garage today that we get out when the grandkids are over. Not only do our own kids still play with them (young and old alike), but those grandkids love them, too.

And the initial cost (which was minimal because I bought most of those toys at garage sales for pennies on the dollar in the first place) has proven to be such a worthwhile investment because those classic old toys do not wear out.

The same blocks and trains and Duplos I brought home for my own children to play with more than 35 years ago are still entertaining my grandkids today. And they’ll likely enthrall my great-grandchildren, as well, before it’s all said and done.

So: rotated toys, we found, hold kids’ interest longer. When kids are daily tripping over the same old toys, they hardly even take notice of them. But put them out of reach for a few weeks, and suddenly those same play things seem newer and more appealing than ever. But that’s enough on toys,

Keeping the Kitchen Clutter Free

Let’s move on into the kitchen. I’ve written extensively about my methods and microsystems for organizing kitchens and streamlining meal prep, including a couple of posts on our family blog and even a book called Sit Down & Eat — all of which I’ll link and today’s show notes (along with my tips for organizing the garage and the toys).

create work stations

I’ll cover a few of my favorites in this episode, though, starting with stations. It’s so helpful when laying out your kitchen if you consider where you’re gonna be doing certain tasks and store everything you need right there.

For instance, we drink a lot of hot tea, so I have a box that we keep all of our hot teas in and our tea strainers and our tea timers. And it’s right next to the hot tea kettle, and everything is just right there where you can access it. The cups that we drink the tea out of are right on the shelf above the tea box, so you don’t have to move from one side of the kitchen or one area to another to complete that task. It’s all there for you need it.

Likewise, when I’m cooking, all my pots and pans are stored next to the stovetop. And plates and silverware and napkins are all stored really close to the table, so it’s super easy to set everything out at mealtime.

buy duplicate tools

Then another thing that has helped in the kitchen is to have duplicate tools. I’ll talk about this more in the episode where I address children’s chores and child training, but having duplicate tools (like two potato peelers and two melon scoops and stuff like that) allows you to work right next to your children.

A lot of times, when they’re little, they want so much to help. And a lot of that is just wanting to be close to you and to learn the skills that you are good at. So rather than doing things sequentially — you know, you measure the tablespoon of baking powder that needs to go in the batter and hand it to your child and have that child put it in the bowl — that really does slow you down and it makes a task take about three times as long as it would take without the help.

There are times where that is called for, but most often you can work side-by-side on tasks, and your children will not slow you down. They will actually help. And that is by having multiple tools.

So, for instance, if I’m peeling potatoes or peeling carrots and my little one comes up and wants to help peel, rather than passing off my potato peeler and finding something else to do while they peel, I just grab the extra one and give it to them.

Then it doesn’t matter how slowly they peel that carrot. I can peel 10 carrots in the time they peel the one. But they’ve still contributed the one, and they haven’t slowed me down at all. So the same is true for stemming grapes or chopping tomatoes or….

You know, if you just have two cutting boards and two knives, they can work right beside you. If you have two can openers, they can open their one can to your three. You can work side-by-side and do the same tasks and help as needed.

And they will be gaining proficiency in the areas that really will be a big help to you as they get better at it. And you’re capitalizing on their enthusiasm while they’re young and doing it that way with duplicate tools really helps you to remain efficient in your time use in the kitchen, but still have your children come alongside you — especially the ones that want to be there.

And then, of course, when you have guests and other people offer to help you with things, if you have two or three cutting boards, two or three potato peelers, that sort of thing, everybody can be working together, and that that really does lighten the load and help out and get the meal on the table faster.

make double batches

Then something else that I have made a habit of doing is by making things in double batches. Now with a family as big as ours is, a lot of times I have to make double batches just to feed them for the night.

But I’m talking about, like, if I’m browning beef, I will brown twice as much as I need for the recipe I’m making right then and use the rest of it in a recipe later in the week or freeze it for use even further down the road than that. So it just streamlines meal prep later.

If I’m making a big batch of minestrone soup, I will make double, put one straight in the pot and the other in a Ziploc bag to freeze for later, and then when I’m in a rush sometime I can just pull it out of the freezer, pop it in the pressure cooker, and it will be ready in a less than half an hour. The same goes for lentil soup. Soups are really easy to do that with, to make multiple batches at once.

My children and I took a class in making freezer meals together. They loved it, and we learned a lot, and it was really life-changing as far as our routines went, because they felt so accomplished helping and were willing to continue helping even when we went through all those steps at home. We were able to lay up so many meals. After just an hour or two of work, we’d have enough meals to last us for a whole month! And it really cut down on food prep day to day that way.

tell at a glance whether dishes are clean

Then another microsystem that we have employed for many years has to do with making it obvious whether the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty.

Do you ever have that problem? Where you are emptying the dishwasher and realize about halfway through that the cycle hasn’t run yet?

Well, we don’t like it when that happens, and so to prevent it from happening, for many years I would just keep a dry erase marker right beside the dishwasher. Then whenever we emptied the dishwasher, I would write the word dirty in that dry erase marker, and when the next cycle ran, the word would wash off.

So if you opened the dishwasher and it said “dirty,” you knew it was still dirty. And if you opened it up and the word wasn’t there, you knew the cycle had run.

The problem is, that only worked for dishwashers with a stainless steel interior. I my sister about that tip, and she tried it on her dishwasher at home. Fortunately, she tested before she wrote the big word dirty on the interior of hers, and it stained and and wouldn’t come off at all. And we eventually ended up in a house that didn’t have a stainless steel interior to the dishwasher either, and so we had to come up with a new microsystem for making it obvious.

Now I know they make like magnets that you can put on the front of your dishwasher that say “clean” on one side and “dirty” on the other. The problem is, when you live in a house full of toddlers, those toddlers will come along and play with that magnet and flip it back and forth and back and forth until you don’t know what side it should be on.

When you come back to look at that dishwasher, it may say clean when it’s not or dirty when it’s not, and you have no way of knowing because those little magnets are so easy to flip around.

So we had to come up with something that was a little bit more foolproof than that, and what we finally settled on was, as soon as we finish emptying the dishwasher, we put the soap in for the next cycle and shut the little drawer the soap goes in.

Then when you run the cycle, the drawer pops open. So when you open the the door of your dishwasher and that little detergent drawer is open, you know the cycle’s run. And if it’s closed, you know the dishes in there are still dirty.

Now we always rinse our dishes before we put them in the dishwasher anyway, so they look pretty clean even when we haven’t run the cycle. So that is one reason we want to make sure that we know for sure the cycle hasn’t been run — and by putting the the soap in and that’s just a habit you have to get in and train everybody else in the family to adhere to that habit and to recognize what it means: When you open the dishwasher and see that the door is still closed, they’re dirty. The door is popped open, they are clean.

bringing order to your pantry

Then for pantry organization, one of the biggest things that has helped us keep our pantry organized is just putting a lot… [transcript ends here; I’ll try to upload the rest soon]