Most people have some type of arrangement near the main entrance to their house, mostly the front door, for storing residents’ and visitors’ coats. Some houses have a simple row of hooks in the hall, whereas others have a dedicated coat closet or cloakroom.
Furthermore, most of these spaces are fairly chaotic with coats heaped on top of other coats which are heaped on top of other coats that no-one has worn for years.
You should apply the same rules to organizing this region, let’s call it a cloakroom for easy reference, as you do to your bedroom closets or wardrobes. The trick is that everything must have a place and everything should be in that place, which means that you and all the family or all the household have to know the rules.
It simply does not make for a tidy cloakroom if some folk stick to the rules while others do what they want. Let’s take an average family or household of four as another norm. Four people such as this will own a coat or two each, a jacket, maybe an umbrella and several pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers maybe.
You could install a shoe rack so that each person can store, say, three pairs of shoes per person in the cloakroom. If your shoe rack has four levels then three pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers each. Everything else has to be stored either in the bedroom or the garage. Some footwear is seasonal, so this ought not be too much of a difficulty.
Similarly with coats and jackets. You could have a row of coat hooks around the walls of the cloakroom and allocate every member of the household a definite number of hooks. (Look out for the cloakroom hooks that have a top and bottom hook – two for the space of one).
Again, all non-seasonal coats to be kept in the bedroom. One more tip here, remember to assign a row of hooks for visitors. Maybe one of the small walls of a small cloakroom could be set aside for guests.
A perfect cloakroom would have a shoe rack on the floor level or a bit higher, then a row of double coat hooks and then a shelf running around it. This shelf is very important. Individuals used to wear hats a lot more than they do now, but some people still wear gloves, scarves and shawls that they would rather not hang on a peg and others like to ride a motorbike.
Never worry, you will always find something to put on a shelf in a cloakroom even if it is merely a tin of air freshener to spray around before guests arrive.
One more item that is often found in cloakrooms that you ought to reserve space for is the vacuum cleaner. It is handy to have a vacuum cleaner in the hall to suck up the bits of mud and rubbish that inevitably get carried or blown into the hall, but you will always have room for one in a well-organized cloakroom
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a number of subjects, but is now concerned with the jean jacket. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Mens Overcoats For Sale.