Closets

We need them. Lots of them. Little, bitty ones. Walk-ins. Any shape or size. This is my philosophy of house-hunting, developed with that popular, and in this case useless, hindsight. Useless, because there's almost no chance that we will be buying another house. Which reminds me of the time one of our girls and her husband were buying their first house and telling us of all the issues and angst they were dealing with. My husband said he remembered all of it from when we bought our first house. Our daughter, who lived her entire life in one house, was curious and asked where it was. My husband had to admit that it was the house we were living in now. We've only ever bought one house. I said that I was going to start referring to him as my first husband. We had looked at dozens of houses, rarely finding anything that appealed to us. Once or twice when we did like a place and put in an offer, someone beat us to it. Finally we saw the house we ended up buying. It had big rooms, hardwood floors and a big yard. We did notice that there wasn't an over-abundance, or even a simple abundance, of closets, but with youthful enthusiasm, and just a hint of desperation, we figured we could add closets, no problem. What we ended up adding was shelving. Built-in at first, then purchased. This worked for many things, but any time we had company we still had to gather and stash lots of stuff. Partly this was due to the usual not having time to sensibly store things, but mostly because there just wasn't enough closet space to stuff it all into. I wasn't alone in this problem. During a gathering of friends, someone asked if anyone else ever filled up grocery bags (this was the days of the large brown paper bags) and stuck them in the laundry room when they were having company. I said that was ridiculous--I used laundry baskets. They held more and rarely tore. Little by little, we are jettisoning things that we haven't used, or looked at, in years. But there's still plenty of things with no real home. I dream about being able to close a closet door on the problems. I know I could end up with a terrible mess behind the door, and that would probably nag at me eventually, but it would be out of sight. A closet may not be perfect, but I'll take it.