Hooking Myself Up

Hello everyone!  Today I have a quick little update to share with you guys.  Recently I've been focusing on sprucing up our entryway, and making it as productive a little corner as it can be.  Last I showed you, we had added in a small bench with cubbies, which is great for corralling small items like sunglasses, umbrellas and dog supplies.  However, we still didn't have a designated place to put our coats or Melissa's backpack.

We do have a coat closet near the front door, but that mostly stores all of our not-everyday coats.  And call us lazy, but rather than hang up a jacket we know we'll use again tomorrow, we would just toss them on the nearest chair, or lets be real, floor.  And there they would stay.  So our living room was usually decorated in an assortment of jackets, sweatshirts and backpacks.

I had been trying to think of a way to get some hooks in our entryway to control this catastrophe for a while, but could never find a spot to put them.  There wasn't enough room to hang them over either the bench or the entry table, so I had kind of given up and given in to the mess.  But then one day it just hit me.  We have an entire blank wall to the left of the bench.  This is where the door swings open into, so it's pretty much useless for anything else.  But a couple of hooks wouldn't need that much space anyways!  I was so pumped about this realization, Melissa and I hung up the hooks that day.

These hooks have literally been a lifesaver!  They are working so great.  Melissa now has a place to hang her backpack when she gets home from class, so it's not laying in the middle of the floor driving me crazy.  And we can each have our jackets readily available for when the weather cools down.  And even better than that, our jackets no longer litter every surface in the living room!

But the best part is that this project was completely free!  We had bought the hooks (from Target for around $10 each I think) for a previous project.  But when we decided to go another way with the project, we still had these hooks laying around taking up space.  So finding a use for clutter creating hooks + organized solution to our coat problem = happy Merrit!

It really is the simple things that make your life feel a million times better.  Now that I figured out my solution, I can't believe it took me this long!  Does that ever happen to you?  Feeling like once you solve a problem, the solution should have been staring you in the face the whole time?

Anyone else making simple and cheap update around the home?  I have another one in the works for the entryway that I can't wait to show you guys!  Leave a link to a project you've tackled recently in the comments so I (and everyone else) can check them out!