Knock, Knock!

After February being such a crazy month with emotional highs and lows, I needed to take a hiatus from my blog...but I'm back now.

In addition to my grandma's death and Handsome's testing, we also refinanced our mortgage down to a fifteen year loan (ack!!) and moved forward with our addition to our house--we're going to be breaking ground in about 1.5 weeks. Yes, February was a crazy month and was more than a bit too much for me to handle.

So, how do I handle crazy amounts of stress? I clean...I clean little areas that nobody ever looks in and that really are kind of a waste of time to clean...so I clean them and then get annoyed that nobody ever notices. Luckily the area that I decided to clean this time around needed some extra attention, so people did notice my hard work...and my family is reaping the benefits of this cleaning spree.

When we painted our downstairs, we never got around to painting our teeny tiny coat closet. In fact, the coat closet kind of became a black hole. Yes, there were coats in it, but there also was a pile of stuff for Goodwill, my camera equipment, miscellaneous packages of bubble wrap, and all sorts of other junk! The children's coats weren't even in the coat closet because they couldn't reach to hang them up.
Did I mention that this is an awkward little closet? Awkward to use and awkward to photograph! Here is another picture with the door removed before I emptied the closet and painted it.
Yes, lots of STUFF in there--including some pretty frames I forgot I bought to hang up in the dining room! Whoops!

I emptied the closet out and used leftover paint to finally give the closet a fresh coat of paint--the first it has had since the house was built 13 years ago! We're the third owners of this house and the first to paint the downstairs at all...so those closet walls sucked up the paint like a dry sponge!
Next I sorted out all the stuff that *was* in the closet and repurposed two bins (from Target) that had been storing puzzles...now their new home is the top shelf of the closet...and they really helped organize the chaos! I had my husband hang up a row of hooks (less than $10 from Target) for the children to hang their coats and I put an extra shoe rack (a castoff from a friend at college about 13 years ago!) in the bottom of the closet to hold our snowboots.
It looks SO much better now...and there still is room for my husband to put his gigantic workbag (backpack/laptop case) as well as for our American flag to tuck into the corner.
I think my favorite thing is this row of hooks. Prior to this the children had their coats hanging from a wall shelf in our entryway and it was getting out of control. Now they're tucked in the coat closet and the children can hang them up themselves!

It's a tiny space (the hanging space isn't even two feet wide) but now it is organized and our entryway looks better too because there no longer are small jackets flung all over the place!