Ditch The Door

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We live in a beautiful small historic home built more than sixty years ago.

While we absolutely love our home, we have faced many challenges about how to comfortably fit a family of eight.

Trending towards a minimalist lifestyle and organizing every inch of our home was not enough.

In frustration one day with a pile of stuff that ended up in front of the hall closet, I said out loud “I wish I didn’t have to worry about being able to open the door of my hall closet!”

Then it occurred to me, why not just remove the door?! At the time, it had an over the door shoe rack on the outside so that my kids could put their lunchboxes, gloves, umbrellas, boots, and backpacks on it in a neat organized fashion. The problem was that the lunchboxes, gloves, umbrellas, boots, and backpacks were constantly getting knocked down to the floor in more of a tornado fashion.

It’s true that great ideas come from places of great conflict.

I enlisted my husband’s help that weekend and we took off the door and installed a simple hook rack about halfway up the back wall of the closet and baskets for the floor to hold backpacks.

The cost was minimal and the effect was profound.

The project was less about organizing and more about increasing functionality. The area was organized well before but because things got knocked down, the space was very dysfunctional.

Now the floor in front of the closet is always clean. Their stuff still falls down from the hooks sometimes but when it does, it falls down inside a closet space, NOT IN MY WALKWAY!! Win!!!