{Day 10} Front Entry and Hallway

Wow. Day 10. I haven't even done Day 9 yet! But I decided to do that one (the master bedroom/closets) next week. It's my party - I can procrastinate if I want to, right?

Today was the Front Entryway of the home. Our traffic is in the back entry, near the garage door, so that's where I spent my time for today's cleaning. Because my "front entry" looks like this...

Not bad, eh? It's glaringly obvious in this picture that we need to paint our front door. It doesn't go with the darker colors AT ALL!

In the hall near our garage door, we have a great closet. It has a bar for coats on one side (where I have a shoe rack beneath to hold most of our shoes) and shelves on the other side. This is a before and after of the top and bottom 2 shelves on the "shelf" side:

I've tried to keep this organized, as you can see, but things get dumped there sometimes. In the 4 baskets are swimming things that the kids can reach: there's a basket for Ryan's swimsuits, one for Kaylin's suits, one for sunglasses (they get lost in our house so quickly) and one for hats.

And above the shelves, I have an OCD organized little system that I created a while back. The plastic bins hold all of our odds and ends - from birthday party decorations to spare light bulbs.

Here is my FIRST after shot of the shelves.

After taking these pictures, I thought, "I have a lot of available space here." I read Simple Mom's suggestion of keeping safety scissors, crayons and paper at low levels for her kids to reach and create with whenever they please, so I moved some of the art supply bins from the playroom closet and put them on the bottom shelf and floor of the closet. These will have to be moved once Baby #3 starts crawling around, but the kids will enjoy having access to this stuff this summer and over the next year, I'm sure.