Winter Gear Storage

I am currently adjusting our family of five into living in an apartment that is a little under 1000 square feet. We were already pretty minimalist about our possessions after several major moves and having to fit everything into storage. However one thing I'm still refining is fitting everything into a small space AND still being able to find what we need.

One thing we need pretty often is winter gear such as mittens, hats, scarves, and so on. The thing about this type of gear is that when a four-year-old goes out to play in the snow, his mittens get wet, so when he wants to play two hours later, he needs a second set of mittens... this makes for lots of mittens. Not to mention things like "cold weather" gear or "I'll be outside for 15 minutes" gear versus "obscenely cold weather" gear or "I'm going fishing in twenty-below" gear.

Needless to say, there is a lot of this type of gear around our house.  And for the last three or four years it has basically all just ended up in a plastic bin or box... lots of harried looking for the other mitten in the set, lots of "but I need the other hat because this one is his" and so on.

Then inspiration struck.

$11 and five minutes of effort later we have everything where we can see it. Mittens are paired with their mates, scarves, hats, earmuffs, and everything is easy to reach.

Most of these seem to be "over the door" style organizers. If you have a regular closet door, perfect! Or maybe you can hang it on the back of your entry door. If not, three little nails and a little wall space (as I did here) works pretty easily too.