before and after

I'm a terrible decorator. I don't know how to put things together and make them look good. I can't really picture how things are going to look, and don't want to spend money if I don't know if I'm going to like something, so many, many parts of our house have gone undecorated in the over eight years that we have lived in this house. I hate how plain it looks, but don't really know what I want most of the time. My husband gets so frustrated, because he wishes it were decorated, but I don't want to waste money on things I'm not going to like for long.

One of the areas that has become increasingly more frustrating in our house is the entryway. It's very small, first of all. In the winter there are shoes and boots galore. There's nowhere to store anything. Our hats and gloves are in a cardboard box stashed on the top shelf of the closet. So hard to get to. We don't have a mud room, or even room for anything like it, so the front entry is the only place to have these sorts of thing. The closet is small, too, so there's not room to store much in the way of shoes either. Also, there's no way for the girls to hang up their coats. They can't reach the hangers in the closet. So they either throw their coats on the chair in the adjacent living room, which looks awful, or I have to stand at the closet and wait for them to bring me their coats every time we come in.

One of my Christmas presents from my parents was a bench with storage, which is something I've been wanting for at least a year, but I've had trouble finding what I want. There are so many qualifications. Size is the biggest obstacle: it has to be small. Another issue is that it can't be flush to the ground because there is a heat register there, which needs to be left open, so it has to be up off the ground. Price was another obstacle. Finding something I liked, which also fit these parameters was tough. But my mom and I finally did it. We found one and she ordered it for me a few weeks ago. She also bought me an early birthday present, and got me a matching shelf with hooks to put above it, which will allow the girls to hang up their own coats.

The bench arrived last week and the shelf came yesterday. Tonight my husband and I put it up. Imagine new, nicer baskets on the shelves, which I'll hopefully find soon.

The first three pictures are before (including the mess of shoes...) and the last picture is after.