Dressing Up The Coat Closet

Our coat closet gets a lot of use, and the door gets left open a lot. Which means I get to stare at the contents a lot and gives me a lot of time to contemplate it's messy, dingy state. So in preparation for school starting next week, I decided to make it a pretty place to store their awesome new school bags and shoes, which will get used...a lot. 

I started by clearing out the closets, wiping down the baseboards and painting the walls a nice light aqua color called Tidewater by Sherwin Williams. 

Next I added a shoe rack to the top shelf to store board games. We used to have a lot of family board games which were stored in a cabinet in the family room, but we discovered after a few board game casualties that they needed to be up high for a while until curious fingers stopped destroying them. So we chose the coat closet to house them for now. The best thing about the shoe rack is that it breaks up the games so they aren't stacked on top of each other which helps with easy access. And when we want to move the games to a different part of the house, the shoe rack can come down and be used in a different way. 

I found a great yellow striped basket at Target for $11 to put shoes in, and then hung their new backpacks. Now I feel like the closet that gets so much use during the year is ready for school to begin. 

And because I've never done one before, here's an animated process of the closet update. 

HAPPY BACK TO SCHOOL!!!