House and Home

Moving into our new home back in October of 2007 was an accomplishment that my wife and I had been saving up for, for many years. Our new home was approximately 900 ft.² with an apartment in the back that was about 350 ft.² that we plan on renting out. Although our new home was almost twice as large as our previous home, the layout was for and we have no room for storage.

The closets were small with no shelving or systems for organization making my wifes shoe storage a joke. So one of the first things I did was build some closet shelving and hang a new clothing bar I would allow for us to hang all clothing. Talking with many of my friends who own their own homes for quite some time now, it seemed like each one of them had some kind of complaints about storage space. Whether it was garage storage, attic storage or just closet storage it just seems like there never is enough.

At least this new home we bought did have attic storage so we were able to throw all of our belongings upstairs in the attic. The only problem with this was that there was not easily accessible because of course you had to crawl through an attic to get to what you were looking for. Our new home does have a garage, but it can hardly be called such. The previous owners had a carport built in front of a garage which was nice, however one of the 6 x 6 posts that supports the structure is directly in front of the garage door. This post limits what you can get in and out of the garage. There is not enough space to even pull in one car into the garage. This is a little frustrating but I am definitely willing to sacrifice having a garage to pull her car into for more living space.

The garage was also divided into two lengthwise. The previous owners used the back half of the garage as a developer room for film and pictures, so I guess you could consider it a dark room. All the walls inside were painted black and there’s only one light fixture that hardly lights the room. The second half of the garage is great for extra storage, but the access is limited to it and the ceilings are low and square footage wise it’s only about 170 ft.².

One of the best parts of our new home is the fact that we have a laundry room off of the back of our garage that allows us to store our lawn chemicals, laundry detergent, clothes baskets etc. our yard is extremely large and there is actually a small storage unit that looks like it was built hundreds years ago that is practically falling apart, however it provides room to store all of our lawn equipment such as our lawn mower, weed eater, edger etc.

So overall we have plenty of storage space here in our new home, however I just don’t think I like its layout as much as I thought I would. We are making do with what we have and are grateful. With just a little bit more work I’m sure I can devise some shelving systems that will help us to increase our storage amount and allow us to become more organized.