A Hall Closet "Make-Over"

Well, the weather around here has hit south of 50 recently and I'm pretty convinced the world will not see me out of my sweat pants until Spring.

It is too cold and it's only going to get colder. I just want to be useless all day and drink lots of hot apple cider. A totally worthwhile use of my time. I'm serious.

Meanwhile, my husband looks forward to April when his wife will finally decide to be a human being again. Although... I might make him wait until May.  Sweat pants are comfy, people.

Anyways, while I enjoy being under-dressed and lazy, I figured I'd share with you a project I actually finished back around the time I reorganized our media center.

The coat closet:

Ahh, this is the before.  A fairly crowded storage area with a bit of an identity crises at hand.  Do I hold coats, or cleaning supplies, or maybe board games? How about a camera? Frisbee golf discs anyone?

And wet suits. Don't forget the wet suits! Even though we live no where near a beach. Gotta keep them in the coat closet...you know...just in case.

It needed some help. My OCD shivered every time it was opened. So help it I did...

...and here is the after:

Okay, so while it is not the most beautiful of transformations anyone has ever seen, it sure is functional. And as much as I love things to look pretty, I like things even more when they serve a purpose (and serve it well for that matter).

So, what did I do?

Well, first, I took all of our coats and put them up in our bedrooms. We had ample closet space in our rooms, but so little in the hallway that it really just made sense.

I did, however, leave us each a single coat to be hung on the coat racks next to the command center.

The board games, as you know, went into the media center. The vacuum, however, was allowed to stay (granted that it behaved properly and minded its manners).

Following the example of this amazing blogger, and adjusting for my own family's personal needs, I tried to transform our hall closet from a place to hang coats into a place to catch all of our random, but necessary, loose ends.

The diagrams below explain how I reorganized everything.

The yoga mat and the frisbee golf discs, alas, were allowed to stay as well. They were items used too often in our house to have anywhere else better to put them. I used an old diaper box, covered in fabric, to corral them in between their visits to the outside world.

They look happy and comfy in there, don't they? ;]

Well, that is basically the gist of the redo. Coat closet turned utility closet. It is seriously one of my favorite things I've done recently. It is nice to have somewhere definitive to put things, rather than an all encompassing junk drawer... or as was my case: a junk catching top of the fridge ( I don't even know why, but that is where everything always seemed to end up.).

What part of your home are you desperately itching to fix? Next on my list is the master bedroom closet. It's like someone let off an atomic craft bomb in there. I'd like to be able to close the door, you know... eventually, someday.

So that's like goal number 35,548 on my to do list.  Clean the closet so that I can finally shut the door. Good. Right. I'll talk to you all again soon. If my closet doesn't eat me.