Our house we moved into has a very small entry area that is combined with a laundry room. One concern I had was figuring out how to make things work in the wintertime when there are lots of shoes, boots, hats, coats, mittens..... In the past we had found an idea that worked with a small entry area we had there as well and thankfully we were able to make it work here as well. Here's a pic of our small entry area. The door is to the right. The pic is taken from the kitchen.
I should have taken a before pic to show what this room looked like before with all the kids' shoes all over the place! Anyways, you well imagine what 20 (at least) pairs of shoes looked like! (My daughter has a few too many pairs and rotates through which ones she wears)
What we've used to create lots of space for these types of things is house gutters. They mount easily to the wall and are just the right size for little kids shoes. It wouldn't work once the shoes get too big, but they still work ok for my almost 9yo boy's shoes. We have one gutter for each child to put his/her boots, coats, hats and mittens on. Then we have the coat tree with a hook for each child. We do have a front closet that I plan on using for extra coats and for snowpants. Here's a 2 pics of the gutters with the shoes in them.
There are nicer-looking ways to do the gutters. If you google gutter shelves or something like that you will find all sorts of pictures with ways to use gutters. Some people use them for bookshelves for people to put books in with the books facing out. You could store all sorts of things in them. I'm looking forward to training my kids to get their shoes etc kept in their own gutter!
What a creative way to handle all those shoes. It's amazing how many pairs of shoes we need. Our back porch is cluttered with all the shoes of our family. It gets really messy looking.
Great idea! Thanks for sharing that! I need to figure something out too! When the girls were very small we kept a basket by the door, but their feet are so big now that is not going to work! Thanks for getting me thinking about this! We don't have mitten/scarf weather here yet, but it is coming, soon I hope! :)
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• Mon 29 Oct 2007 - Untitled Comment