I love having a proper size foyer closet. At Picardy we had an incredibly shallow closet that didn’t fit a hanger. As a result we had our jackets in a hall closet and there wasn’t much room to fit gym, work and misc shoes. But our closet now is a great size. Can’t you tell from this incredibly fuzzy picture?

Foyer closets are hardly ever organized in a way I find that’s efficient. It’s usually a rod all the way across with a shelf above it. This drives me crazy because there is so much wasted space and so much stuff on the ground. I really don’t like stuff being on the ground in a closet, it makes it feel so messy.

Every closet is different in how you need it organized because we all have different crap. For us, these are our needs: not too much hanging space, drawers for hats, scarves and the like, lots of shelves for lots of shoes (gym, running, work, boots…) and some hooks for items to hang off the floor.

It wasn’t too difficult for me to set up a plan. It included an Ikea pax with wire baskets (half the cost of their wood drawers) and shelves. This would be put against one wall. Spanning the length of the other wall to the pax would be a closet rod (leftover from another job) with a shelf on top. Easy peasy.

With the plan, it was time to get to work.

Our friend Ethan ripped all the old stuff out. With Merritt’s supervision

Then it was time for patching and priming. We threw two coats of white on the walls which were leftover from other rooms. I like white in a foyer closet. Sometimes people like to paint a bold color in closets. I think that can be fun, but for a foyer closet I just like clean and classic white

While Chris locked himself in the tiny closet to get it painted without interruption from children (literally) I got the pax built. I had a lot of interruption from children 🙂

At this point I feel like I can built a pax with my eyes closed though, so it wasn’t difficult with the kiddos running and crawling all over it.

Once it was built it was a really easy process of installing everything. Merritt had become obsessed with crawling inside of the built pax while it was sitting, waiting to be installed, so obviously as we were working on installing it she needed to crawl inside it as well

Zoe gets excited to help on projects as well so we used her desire to be helpful and had her hand Chris tools as he was attaching it to the back wall

Then it was just time to get it organized. And soon…Ta da!

Yay!

In the pax we have drawers for scarves and warm hats, my bags, Chris’s hats, and my hats

On the shelves have all our work and work out shoes, a bigger bag for when I work at the A’s and a bin for flip flops and small umbrellas

Then we’ve got the hanging rod for jackets with a shelf above for infrequently used shoes and a bin for hats for other folks to borrow if they come to help on the house on a hot day and need a hat (which has happened pretty frequently)

Then we’ve got a couple hooks for my purse (still my everyday purse almost 3 years after getting it)…

…and broom and larger umbrellas.

Hooray! A finished space in the house! Let’s look at the before again

And after

Love. So much better organized! Hardly anything is on the floor (besides the vacuum), which is the way I LOVE it. Because we’ve rearranged things and really focused on what we need, we’re able to fit much more in the closet, and in a way that we can actually find everything.

And the cost? The pax was about $175 for the unit and the organizing items, we were able to use a leftover closet rod so we only needed to buy the shelf, brackets and some hooks. The grand total came in at about $225. Score.