Most people have some sort 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 over 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 must be in that place, which means that you and all the family or all the household have to be aware of the rules.
It simply does not make for a tidy cloakroom if some folk stick to the rules whilst others do what they want. Let's take an average family or household of four as another norm. Four people like this will own a coat or two each, a jacket, perhaps an umbrella and a number of 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 each 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 kept either in the bedroom or the garage. Some footwear is seasonal, so this ought not be too much of a difficulty.
Likewise 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 certain 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 stored in the bedroom. One more tip here, remember to allocate a row of hooks for visitors. Perhaps one of the small walls of a small cloakroom could be set apart for visitors.
An ideal cloakroom would have a shoe rack at the floor level or a bit higher, then a row of double coat pegs and then a shelf running around it. This shelf is important. People used to wear hats a great deal 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 only a tin of air freshener to spray around before guests arrive.
One more item that is often stored in cloakrooms that you ought to reserve space for is the vacuum cleaner. It is convenient 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 space for one in a well-organized cloakroom
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