The former back porch of my house is only 6 x 10 feet, and I have to pack a lot of uses into a small space. It has three doors, a window, and the fuse panel, and it serves as my main entrance, coat closet, laundry room, and storage. I have a tiny strip of wall that I wanted to use for bags, keys, hats, and mittens. I looked at a lot of different types of shelves, but I worried about the doors hitting the shelves and sending the contents flying. After several months of searching, I finally found these bicycle baskets. They’re very sturdy, a reasonable price, and easy to hang.

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I bought three of the baskets, one for my husband (his is pretty high off the ground, but he’s 6’4″), one for me, and one for all our hats, scarves, and gloves.

When we built this wall, I centered two studs so that I would be able to hang shelves of some kind down the road. If you don’t have studs in convenient places, be sure to use wall anchors.

The bicycle baskets are made to go on a rear rack, so they have an attachment bracket at the bottom. This didn’t bother me at all, but you could remove it if it got in the way.

Here’s a close up of the brass hangers I used to attach the baskets. I got them in a large box of picture framing hardware at a garage sale. They look like the clip part of a D-ring hanger, but I haven’t been able to find one to link to (even google image search match has failed me). If you don’t have any odd metal hardware hanging around, I’d use metal strapping or even part of an old leather belt.

I screwed several cup hooks into the wood trim above to give us a good spot for our keys, since we seem to collect them! The baskets have helped me to be more organized. No system on earth could prevent me from losing my keys (or purse … or gloves … or phone) every once in a while, but these baskets have helped!

— Loryn