Area #10: Other Coat Closet

Our house has a plethora of coat closets.  Makes me wonder if my grandparents had a thing for lots of coats.  There are three coat closets on the main floor.  One by each entry door, and one at the end of the hallway.  I'm guessing that eventually we will turn the one at the end of the hallway into more of a linen closet with more shelves.  It just isn't very practical to have a coat closet at the back end of the hallway by all of the bedrooms.  All of our off season coats go in the basement anyway.  Here's what the closet looked like before I touched it.

I heard one idea for having orderly closets is to have nothing on the floor of the closet.  I think that it really does help the closet look and stay less cluttered, but I also don't think it's 100% practical.  I did decide to limit what gets stored on the floor.  If it can go up, it does, otherwise it can stay.  I moved all of the duffel bags to the end of hall closet along with our beach towels.  There were two fans in this closet that will be handy to store here during hot summer months, but we don't need them here in the winter.  I rearranged some things like putting the folding chairs where you can easily get to them, and simplified the hangers to be all the same type.  Here's my result:

Now there's plenty of room for guest coats if they come in our front door.  The floor is pretty clear, and things are orderly.  The only thing I need for this area is a better bin to hold all of the hand vacuum attachments.  They are all just tossed in the box that came with it which is too small for some of the pieces (as you can see).

This was one of the areas that was fun to tell Kevin, "Go look in the closet."  His reaction to each of my areas has been fun.  Sometimes he exaggerates his surprise at the cleanliness so that I grin from ear to ear even though he's half teasing.  Most of the time he's genuinely impressed with what I've done.  Husbands are great.