Secret Storage Area

We have a coat closet in the downstairs hallway of our house. It backs up to the under side of our stairs. A couple of months ago, my husband cut a hole in the back of our coat closet and put in a door. I now have this GREAT storage space that I didn't have before! I'm using it to store all of my Christmas stuff. It's perfect! Since it is at the back of the closet, I couldn't store anything that we would need to access frequently. I also didn't want to have to lug all the Christmas bins up and down the attic stairs. Plus, it gets super hot in the attic in the summer, so I didn't think that would be the best place to store the decorations.

So, the door to our secret storage area has looked like this for the past two months

Before we put the closet back together again, and actually hang coats in it, I wanted to get the trim spackled and the door and trim painted.

The closet itself is pretty deep. Previously, there was a shelf/coat rack all the way at the back of the closet. This was kind of annoying because if we hung coats on it, we couldn't really keep anything in front of the coats or we couldn't easily access them, but then we just had all of this wasted storage space up front. Our solution was to remove the existing shelf/rack (which we had to do anyway in order to put the door in) and we are going to hang a coat rod across, closer to the front of the closet. Then we will have room to store infrequently used items back behind the coats. You can see how deep the closet is here:

So, finishing out this closet will be on May's list. For right now, I'm just happy to have the door painted and have a home for all of my Christmas bins!