The Nesting Plan: The coat closet

When we last talked about my plan to organize and clean every square inch of our apartment before our third child arrived, I was lamenting how little I was getting done in my current room-in-progress: the office. Not much has changed there, and we’re on our second overnight guest in a row so it’s not really available to worked on until next week. But thanks to incorporating my new tool I’m still feeling like I can keep/get back on track and beat this baby to the finish line. I hope.

So today I actually thought I could make it to bedtime without a nap and would instead use nap time to tackle another smaller space: the coat closet.

This closet is the second one on the left as you walk down our loooong entrance hall (ya, the logic of putting the laundry hookups in the closet closest to the door and the coat closet closest to the kitchen is also lost on me) and contains all our shoes, coats, winter weather needs and other odds and ends. It mostly needed a little purge, some organization, a good sweep and mop and a bit of thought put into how to better use the high upper shelf.

Here’s the low down on what needed to be done and what I was able to accomplish today.

The List

1. Purge the ridiculous amount of empty hangers by half
2. Move J’s larger jacket collection to centre of closet and mine and the kids to the quick-access side
3. Straighten up J’s shoe rack
4. Ask J to look through shoes and jackets and donate any unwanted
5. Purge and reorganize reusable shopping bags
6. Organize hanging organizers (can I say organize one more time?) of kids’ stuff, our stuff and my shoes
7. Reduce board game collection by half
8. Label empty wine bottle boxes (we have about 40 for making homemade) and move to storage room
9. Move all the twins’ jackets from their room closet to coat closet (their everyday favs hang on hooks by the door)
10. Sweep and mop
11. Decide what we’re doing with old second vacuum
12. Decide if something should be moved to the now empty upper shelf, and what
13. Label hanging organizer compartments (can’t use label maker here… what to do…)

Here’s some visuals of the progress.

Our board game collection and boxes of wine bottles. Haven’t touched either since about two apartments ago.

This is less than half the amount of shoes J had in rotation when I met him. Family life changes a man.

This is how many hangers I had left AFTER purging. Don’t really know how that happened.

With what I’ve done and the remaining items the whole top of the closest is going to be empty, save the board games, stroller rain cover, container of sidewalk chalk and a basketball. So I’m looking for tips of what stores well on this high shelf. It’s a quicker access location than the storage room but I don’t want it getting overfilled or we resort to stuffing and organization falls apart quickly. I’m not personally a fan of using these high shelves for anything that needs to be folded or is hard to get back up there neatly – because it never does. And I don’t really need to do the usual box/basket of hats and mittens because the hanging organizers are working well on that front.

What do you guys store in the top part of the coat closet? What type of containers work best?