January | 2015 | The Crazy Hat Box

Take Off Your Coat and Stay a While

by Ali

I’m not winter’s biggest fan for so many reasons. It’s cold, the days are short, the mornings are dark, it’s cold, the weather is often dreary, it’s cold… well, you get the idea. But one of the biggest annoyances of winter is the need for coats. I hate coats. It’s just one more step to getting two kids out the door… actually, make it about 3 steps, when you count turning the coat right-side out, putting it on, then zipping it up. And that doesn’t count hats and mittens.

And then, when we get home, the coats end up all over the place. On the floor, the couch, the banister. Of course, it doesn’t help matters that we didn’t have a coat rack. I tried to corral the mess by putting a basket in the entryway just for coats, but it didn’t work extremely well. Sometimes coats made it in the basket. Mostly, it just looked like this:

Nice. So, finally, after years of living in this house, we added coat hooks in our entryway, and it ended up costing us nothing.

We had a perfect place:

Look at all that empty wall space!

My husband had a board left over from some project or other, so he measured and cut it to size. We also had coat hooks that we were going to use on another project that we didn’t ever complete, and some left over stain and polyurethane. And so, we made this:

And now, coats have a place off of the floor:

Yay! One more step in fulfilling my resolution to being more organized.

The Hard Hat The Mop Hat

Wheel of Breakfast

by Ali

Every year, I make the same short-term resolution (in addition to losing the holiday weight) – to get organized in January. With all the Christmas decorations (a.k.a., Christmas clutter) taken down, and new stuff acquired not having a place, I feel the need to purge and organize. This year, the first thing I tackled was the kitchen.

I have a pantry cabinet. It’s very deep, so it holds a decent amount, but since it is so deep, you have to take everything out to get to things in the back. It’s really annoying, especially in the morning when all you want is to have some oatmeal for breakfast. So, I invested in a few turntables. I was surprised that you can get them in all kinds of sizes, and they’re relatively inexpensive. Here are the results:

Wheel of Breakfast!

The first shelf to get organized was the breakfast shelf. No more pulling cereal boxes out to get to the oatmeal; just spin the turntable! (My husband is the one who started calling it the “wheel of breakfast”.)

Carousel of Cans

Next was the canned goods and beverages shelf. Again – so much easier to get to things and to see what I have on hand!

Snack-Go-Round

Finally, the snack shelf. The kids had trouble pulling containers out to get to the snacks at the back, and they didn’t ever know what we had on hand, so this makes it much easier. This is actually in another cabinet, which is a little smaller than my pantry shelves, so this one was a 16-inch turntable, where the others were 18-inch turntables.