Coat Closet Organization

Participating in in the organizing link-up over at I'm an Organizing Junkie has been a great motivator for me to get all my problem areas in the house fixed.  I'm actually to see the year come to an end, hopefully I'll be able to keep the momentum going into 2012.

This project was actually completed a few weeks ago when I was on vacation and I'm happy to say, totally sustainable!  The sad news is that I'm having problems with the SD card that I took the pictures on and can't post the pictures :(  I'm going to try and get them up later so you can see my before and after.

This coat closet is the one place where we keep all of our shoes, coats, hats, mittens and scarves.  Through the 18 years we've been living in our house, it's been very difficult to keep clean.  I have pretty much solved all the problems except for the shoes.  A number of years ago I bought something similar to this.



It certainly helped moving the shoes from a jumble in the bottom of the closet to a somewhat organized jumble in the bottom of the closet.  Every few weeks it would be Belle's job to "clean" the closet, but that wasn't really solving the problem.  Cleaning the closet every few weeks took care of the symptom but it solve the problem. 
 
This was one of those areas that every time I opened the door, my blood pressure would rise a little bit.  When it really came down to it, here was my problem with the closet.
 
1.  Shoes were a jumbled mess and you had to frequently search for two matching shoes.
2.  Heavy, wet tennis shoes were put on top of my dress shoes. 
3.  Seasonal shoes were often left in the closet, at the bottom of the jumbled heap.
4.  I was embarrassed to let anyone see into the closet.
 
It would seem like the best solution would be to get an over the door shoe bag, but for the longest time I balked about it because I was concerned you would see the tabs at the top of the door (I get a a little anal that way).  However, I had finally reached my limit and decided to try it.
 
My mother had a spare bag for me to try, similar to this one.
 





I am still using the original floor rack since not all the shoes will fit in there, especially the tennis shoes.  However, all of my shoes fit in the bag (except for the tennies) so I've solved the biggest problem with my shoes getting wet and dirty.  We have about 5 - 6 pairs of shoes that can't be hung up, but with the limited number of shoes it's much easier to keep them organized on the floor rack.
 
I'm happy to say that the family has been doing a good job about keeping the space organized so I will declare this a success!  I do have to say, as I look over at the door while typing, the hooks are somewhat visible and I'm not totally thrilled with that.  But, I can honestly say that I'm probably the only one who notices and it truly isn't that big of a deal.  I figure it's a pretty small price to pay for an organized closet!
 
I'll be linking this up over at I'm an Organizing Junkie

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