We keep all the coats, backpacks, etc in the kitchen. It was messy, hard to find anything, and it didn’t look great.

I had thrown up some coat racks and shelves without any real thought. There was a lot of room for improvement. First step was to get rid of all the mess.

And take down all the stuff that wasn’t working.

After brainstorming for awhile, I decided to use premade crates that are available at craft stores. The kids and I painted them with paint I had on hand. It was a good project for the kdis because I wanted a rough finish paint job anyway. I sanded it a bit after. We hung up the crates and I added some coat hooks.

Looks great, but will it effectively hold all our junk… during winter, when we all have multiple coats, etc?

It’s doing a pretty good job. Every person has their own crate, with one extra that is mostly used as a charging station. I think it looks great and more importantly it is doing a much better job at organizing all our junk. Not bad for a project that cost about $60 and only took 2-3 hours.