THe Hall Closet. Ehhhhhh Would We Call This An Interesting Topic?

Who loves the line in Love Actually where Hugh Grant is talking to someone about a new lady who has started working for him. The person he is talking to refers to the new girl as chubby and Hugh Grant says, "ehhhhhhhhhh would we call her chubby?" That line cracks my sister and I up.

Back to the blog... I have the most minor update in the world but you are still getting it. Sorry! I don't have much time to do home-related updates these days so when I do them you are going to hear about it.

Our coat closet is a disaster. Always! Cora calls it my cubby hole since she has one under the stairs and Scott has his cubby hole office. I guess she didn't want me to feel left out. So I feel personally accountable for it.

We have made some not so exciting changes to it!

You are really going to wonder why I think this is all worthy of being a blog post. I tried to justify it earlier but I changed my mind. It really isn't worthy. So I will include a *LIST* (yay lists!) for you. After this amazing list I will have really lame photos of my hall closet. 

Tricks to add more storage in your hall closet:
1. Fill it up with your junk and then take a look at it. If you are really tight on space in the rest of your house like we are you will find a ton of ways to store all of your random stuff. If you aren't tight on space then you should probably find a slightly more normal place to keep your extra junk so your hall closet doesn't look like it belongs to a crazy person. Either way this tip is all about purging your junk and assessing your space.
2. I mean it... just look in your closet. Is the back of the door empty? Not for long? Throw some coat racks, shoe racks, bins, etc up on there. Make sure to use "hollow door anchors" if your doors are indeed hollow. 
3. Hooks! Go hook wild in there! A hook for a bag full of bags? Yes! A hook for your child's lunch bag shaped like a bee? Yes! (Side story... try your best to send your child to school with a lunch bag. Otherwise you will feel bad when you send your kid to the first day of school with a tupperware container with their name taped onto it. You will feel especially bad when the weekly class newsletter mentions that all of the kids loved showing off their lunchboxes... oops! At least by the time Cora got to pick out a lunch bag they were all half off at Taget!).
4. You may think that that area at the very top of your closet is unusable. You would be wrong. If you are a youngin' you obviously use that area to hide in when playing hide and seek. If you are a cat, you find a way up there and nap. And if you are me (as an adult) you smack a shelf up in that gotta-have-a-ladder-unless-you-are-a-giant-like-me space and store the ridiculous amount of used tissue paper that you have accumulated up there. The first two vertical closet space ideas came from how it was used in the linen closet of the house I grew up in. Poor kitty was constantly getting closed into that closet.
5. When our house was being built we paid a little extra to have an electrical outlet put in our hall closet. It is a great place for the dustbuster. It would also be a good place to keep a charging station.

And finally here comes... Our Hall Closet Updates (I cannot stress enough how fantastically exciting this will be):
Soon after we moved in I added a shelf to it so the super high up space wouldn't be useless. And I didn't even write a post about it. How about that!?!

I added a plastic bin for hats, keys, random things.

I added a coat rack to the door. I liked it so much that I added another one:

The lower one is nice because, not only does it give us a bit more hanging storage but Cora can reach it. So when we want her to grab her bag or a jacket. Tada... she can!

If you need some more terribly unexciting before and after closet photos be sure to check out this post of hall closet reorganization happenings at my old house.

If you want even more organizational inspiration check out my not-at-all-up-to-date archives. 75% of the way down I have a ton of links to organizing stuff and every single one is more interesting than this post.

Next week, I am going to show you the fancy paint part that has attacked our house. And the week after that I will be showing off the awesome (no sarcasm here) art display that we made. I love it and you will too!