Coat Closet Organization

One of my organization projects for this year was to clean out our main coat closet.  This is a particularly hard place to organize because it lives under our stairs.  But because it can hold a lot, we put a lot in it.  The problem was, to get to anything from the back, one had to move everything in the front.  And that’s just no good.

This is what we started out with:

The front part of the closet is for coats and hats and gloves and scarves and random shoes (generally I keep my shoes in my bedroom closet, but there are a few that live here, specifically the ones I can put on quickly to run out and get the mail).

Once inside the closet, we turn left, and we have this mess:

See, quite the catchall.  We also had two tables inside which actually helped create a bit of vertical storage.  But in the end, it was just too difficult to use them—pulling items out from underneath the tables was not easy.

The first thing I did was clean out everything from the closet.

Once I saw that our bookshelves could hold all of our board games, it made it easy to sort through the rest of the items that were in closet.  With only about half returning, I knew it would be easy to put what remained back in.

I sorted through our hat-scarf-glove basket and reorganized the items there.

I put non-everyday items at the back of the closet, and put those things we use more frequently towards the front.

I cleared out the shelf in the font, leaving that space for lunch bags and a box of random items like vacuum bags, lint roller, cat grooming supplies, etc.  The iron lives there also.

I took advantage of the door, stuck a Command Hook there, and hung our Texas apron from it.

Bottle opener and a holder for your beer

Complete with potholder

When everything else was in place, I hung the coats back in the closet.

And there we have it—a freshly organized closet!  True, I still have to move an item or two to get to the items in the back.  But it’s only one or two things, as opposed to five or six.  And there’s less in the closet to begin with, so I can see more of what is in there, instead of having to guess.

This closet is much easier to handle now.