We rarely pay to the hallway the attention that it deserves. Yet this is the first part of our house that the guests see when they come to visit us. If we are late for a meeting, it often so happens because we were struggling to find something in the hallway.
The hallway sets us up in a proper mood when we are leaving the house or coming back. In this article, we will share 6 valuable tips on how to make your hallway more beautiful, comfortable and functional.
Declutter It
In most cases, a hallway uses a compact space. This is why it is important to keep it as minimalistic as possible. Shoes, umbrellas, raincoats, keys and shopping bags definitely belong here. Yet there might be plenty of excessive items too: the toys of your pet that you can keep in the kitchen.
The clothes that you were planning to donate to charity long ago but still have not found time for that. Garden tools that are normally stored in the garage… Collect all the objects that create a mess, throw away the ones that you do not need at all and take others to their proper place.
Organize Your Shoes
Carry the water boots away in the garage. For the other shoes, buy a nice puddle-proof tray and an elegant closed shoe rack. Fill in the tray with stones — this will prevent the boots from standing in the puddle after snow and ice melt and drain through the rocks to the bottom of the tray. Be ready to clean the tray regularly — but it will hardly cause a flood in the hallway because most of the moisture will quickly evaporate.
Feel free to place the tray under a bench. You will need some kind of seating on the hallway anyway — and a bench will be more pragmatic in this aspect than, let’s say, a padded stool.
Buy a cute bucket or basket and fill it in with new clean slippers that you will be offering to your guests. If guests rarely come to the house, you should better avoid this solution and hide the slippers inside the closet.
Create Storage
A console with closed doors would come in very handy. Models without doors might look stylish in a shop, as long as they are empty. At home, it is much easier to brush the dust off an even door surface rather than take all the items off an open shelf, clean them one by one, clean the shelf and then put the items back.
Equip your closet with a rod extender to double the amount of the hanging space. Store short jackets on the bottom rod and longer coats on the upper one. Mount hooks on the inside of the door to neatly store bags. If your family members tend to frequently lose their belongings in the hallway, loop a plastic bag around a hanger and collect lost items there: scarves, hats, gloves and so on.
Hang a Mirror on the Wall
If this part of your house looks a bit cold and lacks charm, you can fix it with the help of a mirror that mimics a window:
- Buy four small mirrors
- Attach them to the wall with an adhesive construction
- The distance between each two mirrors should be approximately 1 inch so that it looks like a window grid
- The bottom edge of the mirror should be located roughly 3 feet off the floor (this will be enough to place a console beneath)
- Attach a shelf beneath the mirror and paint it the same color as the wall
From the pragmatic point of view, the mirror will let you make sure that you always look neat and stylish before leaving home. From the aesthetic viewpoint, it will add light and space to your hallway.
Personalize the Space
The bigger your family, the more important this advice. Consider these solutions:
- Install lockers. Of course, they should not look as formal and faceless as in a sports school, so you might want to customize them.
- Buy a personal basket or storage bin for each family member. There, they will put random items that do not fit inside the closet. Each of your pets should have a storage basket too. To mark bins and lockers, you can use magnets.
- Hang hooks with numbers and convince each family member that they always need to stick to one and the same hook.
Personalization will save you a lot of time and nerves. In the morning, when everyone is in a hurry, it would be a disaster to find someone else’s hat on a hook where you normally keep yours — and spend a good 10 minutes looking for your belongings.
Find Space for Miscellaneous Things
No matter how tidy you are, from time to time your hallway will be cluttered with items that you were either about to get rid of or have just brought inside your house and failed to put in the proper place. To restore order, think of the following solutions:
- A sorting station. There, you can put old batteries, smartphones and other items that should be recycled.
- A box for your mail. Or, maybe, several individual boxes for each of your family members — if you still receive printed letters and bills.
- A basket for clothing that you will donate to charity.
Plus, you might want to put a bucket for umbrellas somewhere in the corner and organize a key storage somewhere close to the door.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these recommendations gave you enough inspiration and food for thought. When refurbishing your hallway, avoid filling it with random furniture and decor items collected from all around the house. Invest time and funds into buying nice paraphernalia — that can be found, for instance, in Room Service 360. Once you create a cozy and functional hallway, it will greatly improve your life quality and you will start to smile as soon as you come back home.
