January Cure- Assignments 16 and 17

Oh we are so close to the homestretch here!  Is it the January Cure making this month longer or the fact that January has five Mondays?! 

Lucky me Day 16 is a catch up day!  I need it.  I was sooo good getting started on painting the cabinets but they've sat unfinished for the past week.  All I really need is a three-hour window to put on two coats of polycrylic.  My goal is to have them done before February 1st.  Fingers crossed that happens!

But full disclosure, nothing happened Day 16.  Whoops.

Day 17 though, we got that done.  Set up a landing strip.

How our entry looked for almost the whole time we've lived here.  Until recently.

In our condo, our landing strip was a giant closet of oblivion.  Seriously, we lived there for almost a decade and we could not keep that closet straightened for more than a few weeks. Irony of all ironies is this house doesn't have even a small coat closet.  But the fact that our house has an actual mudroom is fantastic.

We immediately set up hooks for jackets, repurposed a storage ottoman as a bench and got an entry table with more storage.  The only thing that bothered us (well, mostly me) about the entry is that the door opens the wrong way! When the doors opens, it blocks almost all passage into the main part of the house.  The table didn't help things.  It is annoying when greeting guests or coming in with bags and bags of groceries to have to go all the way in and close the door to get in the house.  But I figured until we bought a new door, there was nothing we could do to fix it.

I was almost right.  Until a trip to Home Goods happened.

We saw this farmhouse chic coat rack and immediately bought it.  Home Goods is good at selling things that you aren't looking for but totally need.  We also found those great hanging wire baskets at Home Goods to hold the dog's leashes, mail and keys.

So we go home and Jon starts to put it up.  It was too big.  Then he immediately started to rearrange the entry way, switching the table and the coat rack.  It's ridiculous that we didn't think if it sooner but I guess we were distracted.  While it doesn't completely take away the door swinging the wrong way thing, it does help a bit.  

Now the kicker is that the perfect coat rack is going back.  While awesome, it only has four small hooks.  Not enough to hold all our baggage.  (The literal kind.  We have enough hooks for the figurative kind at the moment, thank you.)  

So we're going to finally fix up the old mantle we got from a salvage place a couple years ago.  We bought it for the entry way back when, but it didn't fit.  Now that we've rearranged it not only physically fits it's going to just look plain awesome in our house.  

But for now, I'm calling Assignment 17 complete!