Our front closet

One of the things I struggle with in this house is the lack of storage. It's a small and old and charming and old cape cod. I love this house, but whoever built it back in 1920-something didn't have the quantities of things we do now. I am constantly going through and purging. Now part of this really appeals to me, I love me a GoodWill bag, but, as a result, I really have to be smart about how I organize things.

We don't have any sort of entryway in our house. You open the door and HELLO! you're in the middle of the room. The "entryway" closet is immediately to your left. It's pretty tiny and I had it packed with coats and jackets. The smallness gets on my nerves but it also bugs me that it's kinda gross. I couldn't put my finger on it because it's just a closet and there's no trash there or anything. But I saw a tutorial on Little Green Notebook that made me take a second look at our closet.

It's the paint. It's that rough cheap chalky paint that you don't want to touch. It wasn't necessarily old, but it wasn't white either. It was like a pinky off-white. There were also too many things cluttering the ground and it felt messy and and dingy and disappointing every time I opened the door.

So this past weekend Mike and I (okay, Mike) took the tutorial and used it as inspiration for our little closet.

Before:

I had already removed about half the coats when I took this picture

Mike gave the entire closet a coat of white paint. Then we taped off two stripes and painted them with some old gray paint we used in our dining room. This project didn't cost us anything (well, that's not exactly true...)

After:

Once I got the place cleaned up, I went through our coats and convinced Mike to donate three jackets. I also moved snow pants into Abe's room. Then I got psyched to get some new storage boxes and ditch the gross old trashcan I was using to store umbrellas. I bought gray and white storage boxes and a bamboo umbrella stand. So this didn't cost me a dime except for all the $$ I spent at the Container Store. 

After I put all the stuff back in there, I realized that the junk clouds the beauty of the paint job. But it does look so much cleaner and more organized. After all, this closet does have a job to do. It's gotta earn a paycheck, not just sit around and look pretty.

It was an easy project, but it did wreak havoc on the living room for abut 48 hours. I'd love to do some other closets but we might as well wait til it gets cold and we don't have the chance to do something outdoors instead.