Throw the coats to the floor.

Look on Pinterest for mini mudrooms. We have a small cost closet but never used it because it was behind the front door and also we're lazy. We had a coat rack but it always looked messy and it cluttered our already tight entryway, which was basically just part of our small living room. We had this awkward alcove next to the stairs and did something kind of like this: http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.ca/2013/03/reader-space-mini-mudroom-makeover.html?m=1

We also bought an Ikea Expedit for keys, work bags and badges,, change, and baskets to catch shoes, mail, umbrellas, random junk. It looks a lot better. We'll probably have to lose the Expedit to sell the house, but it makes the space look less like a drop zone.

Word from the wise, real-life mudrooms never look like the pictures, because they don't have actual coats on the hooks!

Agree. We have a split foyer house with no closet in the entry. We bought a beautiful wood coat rack and a basket for hats, gloves, umbrellas, etc. Both hide behind the front door as you open it. We are also no shoes in the house people, so we have a shoe rack on the other side where all the shoes go. It's tight, but workable.

We don't have a coat closet. We have a coat tree/rack next to the door. If there isn't space for this, put some hooks on the wall. That's what we did in a previous rental.

I ripped out the coat closet in our house. I've come to realize that the kids and I just do not hang our coats up. They get tossed over a chair. So the closet came out and I put up hooks. Now the coats actually make it to the hooks. And if we have a party, there are too many coats to hang in a coat closet anyway.

We have a teeny hall closet that is about half floor-to-ceiling shelving and 1/4 HVAC piping. There are 4 hooks, so we hang a few coats there. The rest are on hooks on the back of the door to the basement and coat racks hung on the stairway walls.

we have hooks on the wall behind the door to the basement (so not visible).

We have a foyer area but no coat closet, a got a heavy iron coat rack from Pottery Barn circa a couple of years ago. We had wooden ones before that that kept breaking before that.

Check out Apartment Therapy for ideas:
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/entryway-solutions-for-small-s-113659

Wall mounted coat rack is a good bet.

Coat rack. We use the bottom of our sofa table for shoes that we are currently wearing, and store out-of-season shoes in the bedroom closet or in the storage at the foot of our bed.

I made a corner into a quasi-mud room area, with sets of hooks at kid level and big baskets underneath for shoes. It's not ideal but it's something.

Anonymous wrote:What do you do with your coats if you have no coat closet and no real foyer area?

than it's probably not my house

Is there anywhere you can hang some hooks on the wall? If you have space, add a small table underneath the hooks for keys/catch-all and put shoes underneath the table. Or get a coat rack and relegate all shoes to the bedroom.

What do you do with your coats if you have no coat closet and no real foyer area?