Tuesday's Tackle: The Coat Closet

My niece is going to be here helping me out for another 5 weeks. It's amazing that half of her visit is already gone. She helped me immensely in the kitchen reorganizing project where I created a baking corner and even went on to make several other areas of my kitchen cupboards more useful. I find myself drinking tea in the morning now that it is so easy to get to the supplies and when my husband gets home it will be easier for him to have his morning coffee at home instead of always going out to the local coffee shop.

Today I had the idea that we should start at the front of the apartment and just work our way through the rooms in the weeks that are left, hitting problem spots as we can. We were going to install the new coat hooks that I bought at Ikea last week but couldn't find my husband's drill and bits. Instead of wasting a lot of time hunting, I decided to store the hooks away and move on to a new project.

We came to the coat closet in my front hallway. It was so full you couldn't get put another coat in and when you did try to remove a jacket it would pull the coat on either side down off the bar with it. The floor was filled to overflowing, literally. The doors did not want to stay shut because the overflow from the floor kept pushing tham open.

We are not finished with the whole closet but we have a good handle on the hanging coats and the stuff on the floor is fairly contained in baskets or boxes with like items together. We can even find the gloves and mittens and umbrellas if we want to.

Several jackets were moved to an unused closet in our back bedroom because they are the wrong season or a couple are simply in-between sizes for my boys. They will hang out in the back closet until #2 and #3 sons have another growth spurt. Ball gloves and small sports equipment have "teamed up" in a small basket on the floor. We pulled out 25 baseball caps from the depths of the dungeon and spread them out on the couch for a picture.

Yikes! We certainly do not need to keep ALL of those caps!

I whittled the caps down to a mere 12 (which still seems like more than we need but it isn't that bad since it includes the ballcaps that are part of my son's team uniform).

Here son #2 plays with the "rejects" before they make their way into the giveaway bag. The best part of the job? 4 bags of stuff in the car to go to charity, 3 other jackets in the wash to see if they will clean up enough to be given away or if they need to be trashed. Either way, they are not taking up space in my closet anymore.

Be sure to head over to 5 Minutes for Mom to see what others are tackling this week.
And I'd love to have you join me (and comment) in my Holiday Bites series, tackling holiday preparation One Bite At A Time.