很多年前，在一个绿色建筑讲座，专注于室内空气质量，我收集了一系列因子，因为One of the most common ways that contaminants enter homes is by hitchhiking in on the bottoms of our shoes!

起初我发现这个惊人，甚至可以嘲笑 - 尽可能多的人，我对这个信息进行了传播。但是，光线开始黎明 - 当我们在脚下走动时，我们不可避免地走在街道，停车场，人行道和草坪上。在那些表面上不可避免地沉积物质，如果你花了几秒钟思考他们，会让你厌恶地擦除你的鼻子：

• Gasoline
• 制动液
• 防冻液
• Motor oil
• Fertilizers
• Pesticides
• 除草剂
• Dog doo

Not too long after that revelation, when my son was about five months old, an Estonian nanny came to work in our home. Sheneverwore shoes in the house, explaining in the most diplomatic way possible that, where she came from, it simply wasn’t done—for precisely the reasons enumerated above.

Now, it was one thing for me to blithely tromp around my house with my shoes on, being sure to wash my hands if they came in contact with the floor. It was quite another to contemplate the fact that my infant child spent a fair amount of his time if not在the floor, then in very close proximity to it—needless to say, his hands were often on the floor, and he would pick upanythingfrom the floor at any time. Hand-washing, even now at age 9, still isn’t very high on his list of favorite things to do.

和so I became a shoes-free convert. Everyone in the household got a pair of fleece scuffs to wear around the house, the hall closet became home to a shoe rack, and we learned to put up with a resident covey of shoes in the entry hall.

When we did an energy retrofit to the house about three years ago (seecase study), we removed a big, leaky greenhouse window from the south wall of our front entry hall. This meant there wasn’t going to be much of a wall left, so, since one of my mottoes is “Think of demolition as opportunity,” I designed a shoe bench and storage area for the space.

无论如何，我是内置存储的忠实粉丝，但即便如此，这也是我家的放弃功能之一。我绝对love它。它每天都使用，占据很少的楼层空间，为这么多的东西提供空间，我甚至无法列出它们 - 但这里是一个很少:

• 鞋子和拖鞋（当然）
• 把鞋子放在上面并将它们脱落（自然）
• Grocery sacks—full ones inbound, empty ones outbound
• 自行车头盔
• Outgoing mail
• Library books
• 钱包，钥匙等，当我进来挂起外套时
• 帽子
• 遮阳伞
• 防晒霜

Our shoes-free policy is a fairly liberal one. Those of us who are here the mostusuallyleave our shoes at the door and pad around in slippers or socks. Some of our visitors do, too. But we don’t insist on it, because some people are really loath to remove their shoes, even though we do have toasty radiant floors. My philosophy is that perfection in anything is pretty difficult to achieve, so if we eliminate 90% of the tracked-in crud, that’s pretty darned good.

Of course, you don’t have to remodel your house to go shoes-free —if you have enough space, you can give this a try just by adding a chair or stool to your entryway and making room nearby for a few pairs of shoes and slippers. You may find that it’s quite easy to adopt this particular habit and leave the dirt at the door.