Endless Searches: Grooming Bags

With the pending (correction, it's now mine!) happenstance ownership of a very nice looking tack locker, I've started to consider life outside of a Stanley trunk. Most people use them only to show... but I've been living out of my Stanley for the past 4 years. My barn had super sketchy tack buildings, but no tack room with lockers and nice things like I was used to... so I packed my stuff into my then show trunk, made sure I had a lock or two on it to protect it from thieving highschool girls and learned to live out of a box.

Look, it's my stuff in a (new!) box!

It got really tight, once I had two horses. Then I got a second trunk, and that made life easier. And now I don't need one, at all. Technically. What does this have to do with anything? Well, my grooming kit needs a new home. I used to stash it in a good old fashioned bucket. And that worked for quite some time. Other than the usual several times yearly routine of emptying it and dumping out the bottom layer of nasty, it worked out ok. Keeping the two horse's grooming tools separate at least in use is still a bit of a losing battle; I get lazy and use one horse's curry on both of them, and constantly steal the one mid-soft brush I have back and forth between the two trunks but most of the time, I behave. For a while I was rocking shower totes from the clearance post-college section of Target; I had a silicone one and my old canvas/plastic one from when I was actually in school. Those worked for a time, but eventually were overcome with hair and dusk and that random sticky something that I can never seem to figure out.

Already I can tell I have some organization issues to resolve... this is the biggest one!

My grooming tools are currently housed in the Stanley trunk trays - because I had two, I could keep them separate. Now that I'm hoping to consolidate most of my day-to-day stuff down to my (new to me) tack locker (and hang cross ties so I don't have to tie, and probably will keep one Stanley trunk in place with spare pads, boots, coolers, etc in it...) I'm starting to go shopping for a grooming tote.

My problem with grooming totes in general is that they're either a) floppy fabric versions of a college shower caddy or b) plastic blocky versions of a college shower caddy. And grooming bags and shower caddies have the same problems: moisture retention/mold, random sticky stuff and general Nasty.

Image shamelessly stolen from Stirrups and Sparkles because... perfect demonstration of my problem with grooming bags,

My wishlist is:

Easy to clean
Doesn't retain moisture
Keeps bottles and tins upright (preventing sticky stuff)
Easy to brush/dump out  - or even better - doesn't retain horse hair and brush dirt
Not too many pockets, but enough to keep things organized.


Of course, I want the fancy Noble Outfitters Equissential tote, because it's expensive and fancy and my barn owner has one and it looks ever so posh with all of her other fancy stuff. And it's looking better day by day.

Borrowed from Stirrups and Sparkles 

The only brush tote/bag/etc of any kind that can hold a candle to the logical storage, ease of cleanliness and general use of logic that appears to be behind the Noble Outfitters bag is JenJ's Amazon find - in big part because of the price. I've combed more shower caddies, tool bags and anything else I can think of...

Image stolen from JenJ's Review because I'm a terrible person

I wonder, is the Noble Outfitters really worth an extra 20$?