Spring is in the air! We're finally getting some warm weather in Chi-Town and it's time to do some Spring cleaning in the little red house. It's the perfect time to start digging into the closets and seeing what's there. There's just one big problem--the closets themselves! We need a total overhaul on our main "closet core" to make them even remotely functional. For this week's edition of PrairieMod Monday, I'll walk you through some of the ideas we have to remedy this closet quagmire we're in.
The little red house is a cozy little Mid-Century modern ranch located in the western suburbs of Chicago. We chose to buy it because we loved the unique architectural character that it has. But, with any older home, there's always some things that need to be tweaked to make it "Uniquely Yours."
One of the major challenges with our little home is what I've come to call the "closet core." As shown in my little schematic above, the master bedroom closet, 2nd guest room closet and the hall linen closet are one core element that all of these rooms share. The problem, though is in the way they are configured. The bedroom closets are currently side-by-side and deep, which means that they are extremely inefficient for any sort of organizational system and clothes fit very poorly in them. They also have regular doors on them which means when opened, they demand door swing-space. The form does not follow the necessary basics of closet functionality.
The hall linen closet is maddening because it is currently to shallow, so that bath towels do not fit adequately on the shelves. This closet also has a normal-sized door on it, which makes accessing it awkward.
So, what to do? Using a Principled approach, we've come up with a solution we hope will solve our problems.
Our goal is not to have giant closets--we don't need, nor want tons of room to accumulate stuff we'll never use. Instead, we are all about good design in form and highly efficient functionality. That's why we've decided to change the configuration of side-by-side deep closets to back-to-back narrow closets. Why? With the longer closet space, we can put floor-to-ceiling closet organizers to maximize the space, allowing our clothes to be accessible and neat. We'll lose a little space in the 2nd bedroom, but it's part of the cost we considered to gain a little more closet room. We also want to make the hall linen closet a little deeper to allow for standard-sized shelves to fit (as well as bath towels.) All the doors will then be replaced with bi-folds to save space and allow for maximum access to the space.
It's a pretty major project to undergo, but it'll be worth it if we can have a cleaner, more efficient set of spaces we can use for storage. We hope to start in a few weeks, so keep checking back to see our progress. Until next week!
Images copyright PrairieMod
Comments