A Fix It

Throughout the year, around-the-house projects pop into my head.  Most of the time, they are not chores that I wish to delve into over the weekends because those are already packed full with regular weekly chores.  Therefore project type chores are added to a list I keep as a reminder.  That list is looked at more seriously over school breaks.  Although this spring break was mostly dedicated to decompressing, I did tick a few spring cleaning type projects off the list.
One such undertaking was the entryway/coat closet. That closet tends to be a jack-of-all-trades closet.  There are coats, gift wrapping materials, random decorations, the table leaves (or is it leafs), games, and lots and lots of accessories.  I am a bit of an accessories hoarder.  Bags, scarves, bags, hats, gloves, and more bags take up a lot of space in the closet.  When I moved into this house, baskets were put on the top shelf to hold a lot of those accessories.  The problem being, I'm not 8 feet tall, so was not able to see inside those baskets and therefore never knew what I actually had.  After a few years of just throwing things in a basket, that top shelf had become a mountain of accessories that sat unused because I didn't want to deal with it.
A few weeks before spring break, I had an idea after one of the big heavy bags fell of the shelf and onto my head.  It seemed like a plausible idea to attach hooks to the ceiling in order to hang several items making them more accessible and freeing up a lot of the shelf space as well.  So I added that to the list of projects for spring break.  As it turns out, it was a better idea on paper than in my closet.  Since I'm a girl, I have no idea how to correctly hang things from anywhere using tools and hardware.    I didn't even want to mess with nails and nail holes.  I had hoped those 3m removable hooks would do the job.   They probably would have if I had been able to find hooks that were deep enough, but the largest available wouldn't even hold one strap of a bag let alone the whole bag.  So back to the drawing board.
Pinterest is a great place to search for ideas and there are several pre-fab organizational options out there.  I wasn't able to find any of the ones that would work for me locally, and I hated to purchase something online without knowing if it would work - the reviews on many of the products were mixed.  I used those options though to figure out some ways to organize the closet.
Some over-the-door hooks with three prongs gave me spots to hang hats and bags on both doors, which then freed up the shelf a bit.
Over the last year or so, I've seen scarf hangers (pre-fab and DIY) all over the place.  I never thought too much about it until I cleaned out those baskets and found about ten scarves I had forgotten about. With the ones hanging on a mirror in the bedroom and those in the basket, there was a need to find some type of organization system.  The pre-fab ones were on the pricier side and the DIY (using hangers and shower curtain rings) needed to be purchased AND put together.  While at the home store I looked at my options and finally decided that the $6 trouser hangers would do essentially the same thing the $15-$20 scarf hanger would do.  I bought two, added the scarves (somewhat by color), and now they all hang on two hangers in the hall closet.

It's certainly not perfect, but simply making the accessories more accessible makes the closet much more functional than it was.

On a side note, the fact that the closet holds more coats and scarves than we've  actually had cold days in the last two years, isn't entirely lost on me.  But I'm ready if the temperature ever does drop!