By Kim Conti, CEO & Founder of Orbit Crates
Years ago, the phrase "protect your threshold" change my life. I was an eager, hopeful young newlywed in the throes of decorating and renovating my first home with my husband. We had worked and saved to buy a small little cape at the end of a quiet dead-end street. A perfect place to raise our future kids and start our life.
At that time, I was listening to a podcast (formerly blog) called Young House Love by Sherry and John Petersik. They always had inspirational content that was realistic for people on a budget who were still trying to maintain a beautiful aesthetic. It was during one of these episodes they shared the term "protect your threshold." This is the idea that it is much, much harder to bring things out of your home once they are in. I started to live by this principle and it changed our home. My husband and I became much more intentional about the things we carried over the threshold - from large pieces of furniture to smaller knick knacks.
So you can imagine when we welcomed our first son in 2014, I hoped we could maintain this principle. And for a while we did. I had a small basket of educational toys that sat in the corner of our bright, sunny living room. For our busy boy, the few toys we had did a really great job of keeping him entertained. We played with him a lot (as first time parents do), and he learned to play on his own. He played with the things in this little basket in new and novel ways each day. He also incorporated other things from our home into play - whether they were pots and pans from the kitchen, to cardboard boxes in the garage.
Fast forward to 2019. 3 kids later, and we had traded in our cute cape for a bigger home. Unfortunately, we had also traded in our one small toy basket for bins, boxes, shelves, and organizers full of toys. As much as I tried to protect our threshold, the toys did not stop coming. As my kids rapidly grew from baby, toddler, to preschoolers, their interests cycled just as fast. Our family wanted to make them happy, so the toys kept coming. We had become inundated with toys.
It was then that I realized, there really wasn't a way to protect your threshold when it came to toys. We had became victims to the toy cycle. We spent more time organizing bins and boxes on the weekend than we did playing. I thought that once the kids became bored, I'd just donate or sell the toys. Easier said than done. I had stopped protecting my threshold.
It was from these moments that Orbit Crates was born. I wanted a way to keep my house free of clutter, but still offer my kids novelty and fun with their toys. I believe that renting toys is the shift we've all been waiting for. Particularly in American society, there is so much available to us. But more doesn't mean better.
With Orbit Crates, you can truly keep just a few baskets of toys in the corner, but still offer your kids novelty and delight when it comes to play. By protecting your threshold, you give yourself peace of mind that what comes in, will go out.
As you cross over your threshold each and every day, think about what you're bringing into it. Think about the time it takes to get things out of your house - the Amazon returns you'll do eventually, the Goodwill bag that's riding around in your trunk. If we protect our thresholds from the beginning from the things we don't want inside, we don't create work for ourselves in the future.
The threshold of our home is a beautiful thing. It serves as a physical divide and barrier between the outside world and the inside of the place we love the most. Some days you may hurry over this threshold with your arms full and babies crying. Other days you may be grateful to cross over it from a busied day in the outside world where toddlers were crying and melting down. The threshold symbolizes what we want to keep on the outside and what we want to protect in it. Protect your threshold.