Hi friends, here I am again, I hope you aren’t sick of me with all this closet posting. As I near the mid-way point though I’m starting to tire out so if you have an idea for a post that I haven’t covered yet be sure to let me know.
Every year when I go to Ontario to visit my family I always help my sister with her organizing projects. We always have so much fun. She is one of those gals that just needs someone to sit with her and crack the whip a little bit 
Once she gets started though it’s hard to slow that girl down. She becomes a purging machine!
In the past I have done a number of spaces with her including her nursery, her kitchen, her most excellent toy storage and her front entryway.
This time we started with her front entryway. Yes we had done it before (link above) but that was back in 2007, 6 years ago. Since then she has had two kids and needed to give it a bit of an update to accommodate their growing needs. Plus she needed a backpack station as my oldest niece is now in Kindergarten. It’s not a huge closet but we were able to make it work.
Closet before:
We kept the same system as before with the cubbies we had previously implemented. Those were still working well. Our main goal was to find more space for all the small shoes as well as make room for the swim bag and my sister’s purse. All this was going to require a big purge of the space.
The only way to do that is to empty out the closet completely.
I say this over and over again but it’s so important that I’m going to remind you again. The fastest and easiest way to organize a closet is to empty it rather than do the organize by shuffle method where one just shuffles through the stuff trying to make it work. Pull it all out and do a proper sort and purge outside of your closet. It makes a big difference. Would I lie to you? I know it sounds like it would be more work but it actually goes much quicker and I do believe once you have everything sorted “like with like” it becomes painfully clear what you have too much of.
Also remember that it will look worse before it gets better.
Get excited as you watch your purge pile grow. It’s exciting!!
Here is the after:
So the biggest thing we added was a shoe organizer similar to this one:
This was about $9.00 and allows room for quite a few pairs of shoes. She is using the lower slots for the girl’s shoes so that they can put them away themselves.
My sister also switched out her hangers in this closet to the thin hangers as well.
The swim bag is now located in the top left hand corner and her purse found a space on top of the shoe cubbies now that they weren’t littered in shoes. And look room to spare!
Finally she created a backpack station right by her front door using the wall space she had there and some Command hooks. It turned out great!
I hope this gives you some ideas for organizing your own small entryway closet. Have fun with it!!
Let me know if you have any questions about what we did.
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