Avoid Small Closet Design By Planning Before You Build
Most of us are living in rental spaces, or homes that we lovingly shopped for and chose. Regardless of whether you love your apartment or house, the same can not often be said for the size or design of the storage areas that came with these homes. Given the opportunity to design a house with perfect closets, what are the important things to consider before actually deciding on how big our closets really should be?
Well, to help you with some of the decisions that you will be faced with when trying to figure out exactly how many and how large your storage areas should be, I’ve come up with a few key points to keep in mind. Making sure that your closets are functional, and not over or undersized, will end up creating an easy to live in space with a good trade off between living and non-living storage space.
Closets used to be just tiny little rooms with a single door, a hanging rod and a single shelf – no fancy stacked hangers or pull out shelves or compartments. The basic closet was functional, but not always convenient. And since it was given such a low priority in comparison to living space, older houses are often not equipped with as much storage space as we typically would like these days. When you have the chance to design your closets from scratch, you might want to consider larger spaces, which means you need to figure out what makes a good design for a larger storage space
Whether you decide that you need a lot of big storage spaces or fewer small storage spaces, the answer inevitably will be determined by a few factors – how much can I afford (remember to add the cost of the closet organizer systems on top of the square footage cost), and do I have the room to allocate to that amount of storage versus living space. Remember that bigger isn’t always better – there is the added expense of outfitting the space with organizer systems, but more importantly, the danger of extra clutter just because you have extra room could be a concern.
If you determine that bigger isn’t better in your case, then make sure you put as much effort into properly designing the available space for your smaller reach-in closet areas. Having a well fitted and organized closet shelving system will help you maximize the amount of stuff that you will be able to comfortably store and access. Remember to think about the opening, and whether all areas of your closet can easily be accessed – otherwise you will end up with wasted space.
When you are designing your storage spaces, lighting is often the last thing people consider. Just remember, if you can’t see where you are putting your things, or you aren’t able to see things when you are looking for them, then it almost negates the value of that extra storage space. Make sure that shelving or stored objects don’t block light from getting to other shelves, and keep in mind where you will be when you are looking for things, and you yourself don’t block the light.
Finally you need to consider the actual contents of your closets – before your stuff goes in, you need to design the physical shelving systems, and boxes, and racks that will hold and organize all your items. This is a good time to go to a building center to check out their storage departments to get an idea of all the new innovative ideas in storage systems. You want to create a closet or pantry with enough space to hold all your items comfortably, and organized in such a way that you don’t need to reorganize your whole closet when you are looking for something way at the back.
The most effective storage space is designed so that you can use all available space to store all your items, but wil also let you store and find exactly what you are looking for without the need to dig from front to back, or top to bottom before you find what you are looking for.
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