Dad Hacks! Pegboard Edition
Volume 2, Issue 25
Raising kids introduces a lot of love, grace, and wonder to your life. There’s also a lot of literal stuff involved, though: self-replenishing piles of tiny laundry, sharp plastic pieces of indeterminate origin, sippy cups, dinosaur accoutrement. In the earliest days of parenting, it can feel like your child has unspoken territorial ambitions, annexing more and more of your house for their wares.
All of this material accumulation reaches its apex in a home’s entryway, where piles of creepily small shoes - many of which don’t even fit your child’s feet anymore - perch atop hastily abandoned diaper bags whose contents are spilling onto the floor.
That’s where our next DAD HACK comes to the rescue: put a pegboard in your entryway.
Now listen, fellas, I’m not gonna lie: I enjoy interior decorating. I’m as big a fan of the decorative wall hook as the next guy. An array of multi-colored mounted dots? Yes, please. Natural wood, crafted to meet the curve of your coat collar? Mmmm hmm, mmm hmm.
But when you have kids, you don’t have the luxury of prioritizing overwrought entryway aesthetics. You need to store a lot of stuff, in different sizes. Not to mention, what you need to hang and arrange changes, all the time. First it’s diapers. Then, the aforementioned baby shoes. Eventually, a library of travel snacks and toys for the road. Aesthetics cannot be your primary concern, and elegant hooks perched at adult eye level - the fallback standard for entryway storage - are kinda useless bullshit in this context.
The pegboard entryway, on the other hand, checks a few major boxes. First and foremost, it’s adaptable. Need to hang a toddler scooter today? No problem. When your kid loses interest in that scooter the next day (spoiler alert: they will) it’s no sweat to accommodate a backpack full of crayons or an alligator plushy. As your child’s whims blow, so does the pegboard.
Second, the pegboard design accounts for a range of heights. You could hang hooks at varying levels in your entryway for infant, toddler, little kid, big kid, and adult … but you’ll end up rehanging hardware, not to mention patching holes, intermittently for a decade.
Third, and not for nothing, the pegboard is kinda fun. Kids can manipulate the various hooks, cups, and shelves, while you, the parent, can bask in the immense pleasure that comes from introducing the illusion of order and control into your chaotic home.
I installed the solution in the picture above myself, in under an hour, using less than $60 in materials from Home Depot; most of my budget was consumed by buying two separate 4 x 8 ft panels of pegboard.1
The literal stuff of parenting can take over your life, quickly. To curb the accumulation, I urge parents to buy as little as possible. For the stuff you do have, though, a pegboard is a practical way to triage your shit.
Remember not to mount the board directly to the wall, as you need space behind the holes for the hooks to secure themselves. I used intermittent pieces of 1 x 2 pine board, cut to size with a chop saw, and anchored the pine boards to the wall first, for both support and spacing depth. If that sounds above your pay grade from a construction standpoint, there are solutions that require literally zero carpentry.
A fantastic idea! I find it deeply satisfying to organize the blatantly, difficult to organize. A tribute to your upbringing with the emphasis and early exposure to Micro-decorating.