We don't have it that bad. I keep my cleaning equipment out in the garage next to the kitchen.

Any house I build will have either walk-in closets in all bedrooms or at least doors that stretch the width of the closet. Anyone else have a foot or two on each side of the door where its impossible to store something and still see it?

Speaking of walkin closets, my grandparent's old farmhouse had walk-ins, you could access from two different bedrooms. The closet was built in the middle. I wonder if that would be a space saver? I bet we could store extra stuff that way.

Our pantry. It's wide and shallow, which would be great if they had used double doors so I can access everything. But no, they used a single door instead, to the extreme right side. So it is SO hard to reach anything to the left of the pantry. (Imagine shelving with a wall right in front of it.)

Our walk-in closet. There is one short flourescent light right as you enter it, so the back part is dark. Fortunately that can be fixed by adding another light.

Hose bib inside the garage. DUMB, DUMB, DUMB.

Sheryl

No coat closet! My house is in a neighborhood of quaint old one-of-a-kind cottagey type houses which began being built in the late 1930s. Typically, people just added a room here and there, so each grew in crazy ways. Love the community, mainly even love my house, but in addition to no coat closet, there are only 2 interior doors in the house: my bedroom and the bathroom. The doorway into the 2nd BR is so narrow that anything but a panel door would block it too much.

I have a hube storage room that has my washer & dryer in it, but it's unheated and you have to go through the house to get there, so it's not a place for coats to go. Right now I have a bar in my rather large linen closet in the bathroom where I hang coats - not great, but better than nothing!

When we were shopping for our condo, my DH insisted that we find a place with adequate storage. He said that it may seem strange for a man to care about closets, and I'm no Imelda Marcos, but he insisted that we have closets in each bedroom and in the hall. Many places we looked at had no coat closet. I am very grateful that we have a large utility closet-- complete with built-in shelves. Although I had to downsize my vacuum cleaner and get rid of a few brooms and mops...

This is soooo common.

Our last house had no single place to put a broom except in the front coat closet. So, that's where it went. The vacuum just ended up sitting in the corner of my bedroom. I just could not lug it up three flights of stairs all of the time.

When we redid this current house, you better believe I put in a place for those items and the storage is right where I use them, not two flights away.

Gloria

I keep our broom & mop on the wall going down to the basement. The door to the basement is in the kitchen. Otherwise, they would have to stay in the closet I use for coats, off the living room on the other side of the house. We have 3 closets in this house. 1 in the office, 1 under the stairs (the coat closet) and 1 in my daughter's bedroom downstairs. But we do have a number of unfinished, unheated "spaces" where I store a lot of stuff.

Isn't that the truth! We had a house that had no basement, a two car garage that MAYBE could hold two compact cars if you didn't put anything else in it and ONE 2-1/2 ft wide coat closet. No linen closet, nothing. It had one bar for the coats and one shelf above. That was it. Now, I've opted for every closet available and now thinking of building another pantry-type closet. Now their building secondary bedrooms the size of a closet? Who's in charge of this garbage anyway?

Good thing we didn't have children at the time. We used a spare bedroom and it's closet.

Don't you just love all those shows on HGTV where the decorator/organizer/real estate agent chastises the homeowners for using the spare bedroom/basement/back porch as a junk room (i.e., a place to store "personal" items like muddy boots, vacuum, ironing board...)

This is so funny, my MIL and I used that *exact* line (a man...) about my house a few weeks ago, for the exact same reason! It really is puzzling because although my house is no mansion, when it was built it was definitely on the upper side of the general style of the neighborhood--a group of pilots bought parcels on the same block and all built houses at the same time. So it is/was a decent sized house...with woefully few closets!

I have a grand total of 4-no walk ins, no coat closet, no broom closet, no pantry. There is one closet in each bedroom, just standard sized. One narrow linen closet. And, that's it.

I truly don't understand how someone designed this house and simply ignored storage space. Oh, the bathrooms are all very small and have no built in storage either.

I have closet envy about my MIL's house. She has at least one decent closet in each room, and 2 in the MBR. A wide hall closet. *2* linen closets, one near each bathroom. Large pantry in the kitchen. And there she is, one widowed lady living all alone with all that storage space while the 4 of use cram things in, frantically try to figure out what to keep and what to discard, etc.

Oh, and my vacuum cleaner and broom are stuck next to the door in my garage. Literally not a place in the whole house to keep em otherwise.

Ann