Читать книгу The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook - Liz Fraser - Страница 16

The entrance hall is the first real room people see in your home, and it’s where they form their first impression of what sort of person you are, how you live and whether it will be safe to have a cup of tea without giving the rim a quick wipe first.

A quick glance around my hall today leaves any visitor in no doubt at all as to my life and personality: a pram (currently with a sleeping baby in it), a plastic fireman’s axe, a trumpet made of a plastic milk bottle and a cardboard box, sunglasses lying on top of a pile of wet children’s socks and trousers after a puddle-splashing session this morning, a pile of half-opened mail, a sticker book, five coats hanging off the banister, three pairs of shoes at the bottom of the stairs (despite there being a virtually empty shoe rack three feet away), a selection of toys, hair bands and bits of my jewellery waiting to be taken upstairs, and three sweet wrappers. It is, without wanting to do myself down too much, an absolute disgrace, and it screams: slightly hectic working mother of three who knows how she wants her house to look (the entire Elle Deco back catalogue visible in the lounge is a dead giveaway) but is fighting a losing battle on account of her own and her family’s inherent slobbishness and inability to put anything away where it lives, ever. There it is—my family exposed in one room.

The good news for anyone like me is that with some clever tricks and new habits, an entrance hall can be transformed from something that looks like a car-boot sale, to a space belying you as a balanced, well-behaved, orderly family. I don’t suggest for a minute that you stick to this at all times—who wants to always be orderly and well-behaved?—but I have learned the following from my years of pretending to have it all under control:

Clear the decks. Get rid of any surface where things can be ‘put’. Until very recently we had a hall table. This looked like a jumble-sale stall most of the time, as every member of my family dumped whatever they couldn’t be bothered to put away on it. Keys, water bottles, apple cores, hats, hand cream, you name it. Now we have no hall table—and no mess, because everything gets put away immediately or hidden…

Create hiding places. These are not for you to hide in when people come inside and realise what a slob you are, but so you can easily hide all the mess. Put curtains or cupboard doors in front of lower shelves to disguise all the toy boxes; find furniture that doubles as storage, such as benches or window seats; and store all the children’s stuff in big, beautiful baskets or chests. When all that bright plastic is piled into a gorgeous container it looks much better!

Coordinate and conceal. Even the ugliest collection of odds and ends can look reasonably smart if it is well-housed. Matching pretty boxes, baskets or other containers create an air of unity and organisation, which conceals the fact that all is chaotic. Keys, gloves and the rest of the usual entrance-hall para-phernalia can be thrown into coordinated storage places and suddenly all looks neat again.

Habits. Nobody can help you out here except yourself. Get out of the routine of chucking your coat on the table as soon as you get in and leaving your shoes beside the shoe rack. Relearn new, tidy habits through lots of practice and you will eventually find that the place looks after itself. Now, if you can just get the other family members to do the same…