What's Inside the Door? (Storage!)

It took me way too long to realize it (we're talking many years here) but, doors offer great storage.  Behind almost every non-folding door in our house is some kind of hanging storage.  We live in a small Cape Cod with the benefit of a ton of built in storage, not just in the kitchen and bedrooms (both of which had cabinets besides the closet), but also in both our offices and decent enough storage in the kitchen (not enough for me to have my much dreamed about pantry but enough).  But with all my purging and organizing projects, especially over the last 3 years, I've been clearing out spaces and wanting things more accessible and with an exact spot.  Now, a few years in, the only thing I misplace regularly is my phone and that's only because it doesn't have a spot (since it's usually on me).

A few things I noticed when walking around to take all these pictures:
1) We really need to paint inside some of these cupboards.  The paint is chipping pretty bad besides being dark (I knew painting inside the lower kitchen cabinets was coming someday).
2) We do a lot of baby proofing.  Almost all our lower kitchen cabinets and drawers have baby proofing.  So much that we've had people over with many more kids than us who remark about how baby proofed our house is.  I think a lot of that happened when I was on crutches and chasing Luke around every second just wasn't as possible.  Also, it's just easier to keep him out of things (I have never regretted buying a tv stand that locks.). 

There are many ways to maximize the storage in your house and being more organized never hurt anyone.  Here's how we currently utilize the doors to keep things organized, easy to reach, and in place.

My Office
Besides my desk, bookshelf, and filing cabinet, it has almost a full wall of built in storage.  This includes our coat closet (see more here and here). 

One door to the coat closet has umbrellas and Luke's coat(s).  In hopes that when he's a little bigger he'll be able to hang up his own (although we have a gate keeping him out of this room most of the time).  

The other door has some of Luke's art supplies.  The mesh organizer (from Target) holds the coloring books we currently cycle though as well as construction paper, markers, and other printed coloring sheets.

The other taller cabinet in my office holds our (little used) ironing board and iron.   One of the doors hold other ironing supplies.  I cannot tell you the last time I actually ironed clothes.  Most of my ironing (the little I do) deals with iron-on hem tape, sewing projects, or linens (super rarely).  Matt has to iron his own dress shirts (which he only wears for church and weddings) which means they pile up for about a year before he finally gets around to it (or runs out of clean shirts).  He does this while we watch some tv together and I drink a beer.  Pretty nice deal for me. 

Matt's office has some nice storage but it's mostly folding doors which don't work for this kind of thing.  When working on this post I realized we don't have anything on the back of his door which immediately got me thinking.  Now I have another project for his already long list of things I'd like him to build. 

The kitchen.  We have all sorts of projects in mind for it this year, we'll see how many happen.  Someday I will also figure out my much lamented spice storage problem that I have been thinking about for 4 months. 

This is the only upper door with storage and I posted about it last fall.  Recipe pinboard.

The cabinet by the back door (more here).  The bottom board is all our paper coupons (so hopefully we remember to use them). The others are recycling reminders, my monthly to-do list, a general "get on that list", a list of everywhere I've called to be removed from mailing lists, an inventory of what's in the deep freeze, a running grocery list, and general other reminders.  These cork boards are from Target, were relatively cheap and are great. 

Now various lower cabinets (almost all of them).  Cereal cupboard: Luke's bibs (which I know are pretty gross at this point and will probably be tossed once he's done with them) and my 1 cup measuring cup for cereal (I measure all my cereal):

Next set of cabinet (next to the oven) has pot holders on one side:

And plastic wrap, wax paper, aluminum foil, and gallon ziplocks on the other (organizer from Lowes):

The cupboard with all my muffin and cake pans, larger pots & pans, and cutting boards has one hanging on the door:

And the cabinet under the sink has various cleaning things (vegetable scrubber, extra dish scrubbers and scrapers, dish gloves, extra orange bags to be turned into scrubbers)

The bathroom door has our towels on one side.  This is the only picture of all of these I didn't crop because wow, I will really love our bathroom.  I'm still impressed with all the work we (Matt) did in there.  Maybe the prettiest room in our house.

Moving upstairs...our bedroom door has our bath robes(bought on our honeymoon cruise...they really get you addicted to those.  They also gave up the option of buying the bedding too...we resisted that one).  These would go in the bathroom if we had room for them.  Which we don't.  (I'm pretty insistent that our next house, not that we are looking, has a master bathroom!)

On the backside of that door is my wedding dress.  We don't have a single full sized closet in our house and so this is the best place for it. 

The back of Luke's door has a full-length mirror (from Aldi).  Super handy.  I take a lot of "I want to remember this outfit" pictures here.  (This is not an outfit I need to remember, this is a "taking a picture for my blog" picture, featuring my "we aren't leaving the house today" uniform and hair that probably needed to be washed but wasn't since we weren't leaving the house.)

Inside Luke's closet are his hat and backpack (really my old kindergarten backpack which I am THRILLED he still can use):

And his sweatshirts.  He doesn't have much hanging in his actual closet but I'm a big fan of hook storage for ease. 

And that's it!  Almost every single door (besides the entry doors) have some sort of storage on the backside.  Now I'm really thinking of the few that don't (Matt's office, basement) and what we can store there.  These kinds of things excite me.  I love finding better ways to store and organize!