One of my pet peeves is the mess of stuff that ends up by the front door. Bookbags, purses, lunchboxes, shoes, endless dirty socks, and lots of coats! All the kids, and my husband and I, are old enough to put our things away, yet every day there ends up being a pile by the front door. I finally gave in and put a chair there to collect things and for sitting on to tie shoes. When company is coming it’s easy to collect everything and hang it up in less than 5 minutes, because I spent some time organizing our coat closet to make it more efficient.
I have 7 various coats, jackets and sweaters in the closet, Bob has 4, and the kids each have 3-4. I recently went through and purged the too small, summerweight stuff from the closet, and found space for snow boots, snow bibs, and snow gear (because you never know when NE PA will get an inch of snow!). The boots all got stuffed inside one another, the snow gear is in a basket, and the green bin is full of games that travel well for the car. I also have a hanging shoe rack labelled with our names so everyone has a place for their shoes.
Thankfully the closet is also tall. We have these doors that go to the ceiling which are ugly and dated but I love all that space. I use the top shelves for storage of paper products, pantry items liked canned tomatoes that don’t fit in the cabinets, and items that have been borrowed from or are being given to friends. I got the idea from my friend Erica to use the coat closet as a pantry, so big kudos to her.
I think maintaing the closet organization will be easy. I’ll clean the floor once a week, and once every season we’ll go through and purge old jackets.
Time spent: 30 minutes organizing
Time saved: 5 minutes a day
Hopefully my coat closet post didn’t bore you, what can I say? I get excited by an organized closet.
Kelly
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