The Storage Problem in Older Claremont Homes

People fall in love with an older house in this town for the front elevation, the trees, and the woodwork. They fall out of love with it, six months later, over closets.

This is the least romantic thing to think about during a search and one of the most reliably consequential. Storage is a daily-life problem, it recurs constantly, and unlike almost everything else in a house it is very difficult to add without construction.

Why the old plans are short on it

The houses were not designed badly. They were designed for a household that owned dramatically less.

A bedroom closet in an early-twentieth-century plan was sized for a modest wardrobe. There was often no linen closet as we would recognize one, no coat closet by the front door, and certainly no space allocated to the categories of possession that now fill a modern house: sports equipment, seasonal decorations, home office supplies, small appliances, the accumulated infrastructure of a hobby.

MID-CENTURY PLANS ARE USUALLY BETTER AND STILL NOT MODERN. Ranch-era houses in this valley tend to have wider closets and more of them, plus attached garages that were designed with storage in mind. They are still working from a much smaller baseline than a house built recently.

None of this is a defect. It is a mismatch between an old plan and current habits, and the question for a buyer is simply how a specific property resolves it.

Where the storage actually hides

The good news is that older houses here often have more capacity than the closet count suggests, and some of it is easy to miss on a tour.

THE GARAGE IS USUALLY DOING THE WORK. In a large share of this town's older stock, the garage is not primarily housing a car. It is the pantry, the workshop, the seasonal store, and the place things go. This is worth naming honestly because it changes what a garage is worth. A detached garage in decent condition with power is a much more valuable asset than its listing description implies.

THE ATTIC EXISTS BUT MAY NOT BE USABLE. Many older houses here have real attic volume. Whether it is accessible, floored, and ventilated well enough to store anything you care about is a separate question, and it is worth actually looking rather than assuming. An unfloored attic in a hot valley is not a place to put anything that can warp or melt.

BASEMENTS ARE RARE. Buyers arriving from other parts of the country often assume a whole storey of storage that this region generally does not provide. Plan without it.

SHEDS AND OUTBUILDINGS ARE COMMON AND VARY WILDLY. Some are well-built and genuinely useful. Some are a tarp over a frame. Look inside.

BUILT-INS ARE THE UNDERRATED FEATURE. Older houses in this town frequently have built-in cabinetry, window seats with lift lids, and cupboards in hallways and dining rooms. They are usually presented as charming details. They are also real cubic feet, and they are the reason a house with three small closets can function better than one with four large ones.

What to actually check on a showing

A short and unromantic list.

Open every closet. Not glance at, open, and note the depth as well as the width. A shallow closet with a single rod is a fraction of the capacity it appears to have.

Ask whether the garage is used for cars. The answer tells you what the household found necessary, which is the most honest storage assessment available.

Find the attic access and look at what is up there.

Count the places to put a coat by the front door. In a house with none, that becomes a permanent daily friction and a piece of furniture you had not planned to buy.

Look at the kitchen with the same eye. Older kitchens in this town frequently have less cabinetry than a modern household expects, and the pantry may be a shelf.

What can be added and what cannot

This is where the practical judgment sits.

EASY: shelving in a garage, a wardrobe cabinet in a spare room, closet organizers that use the vertical space an old closet wastes, shelving in an attic if it is floored. Most storage problems in an older house here are solved cheaply by taking the existing volume seriously.

MODERATE: a built-in in a hallway or under a stair, converting a shallow closet, adding a shed. These are projects but they are ordinary projects.

HARD AND WORTH THINKING ABOUT BEFORE PURCHASE: adding an actual room. Converting a garage. Anything requiring permits, foundation work, or a change to the footprint. If a house's storage deficit is large enough to need one of these, that is not a detail to sort out later. It is part of the price.

Matching it to how you live

The honest reframe is that storage requirements vary enormously between households and there is no universal standard.

Some households own very little and find an older house's proportions completely adequate, even preferable. The constraint acts as a discipline and the house stays uncluttered.

Other households arrive with the contents of a larger, newer home and try to fit it into a plan that was never asked to hold it. That is the version that goes badly, and it usually goes badly quietly, over a year, as the garage fills and then the spare room does.

The useful exercise before buying an older house here is unglamorous: think about what you own, and where specifically in this floor plan each category of it would live. If more than one category has no answer, that is information.

The lifestyle guide covers the broader picture of what daily life in this town asks for. The home-office guide is closely related, because the spare room is usually the space competing to solve both problems at once, and the hosting guide covers the third claim on that same room.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009. On a second showing, open the closets. It is the least glamorous thing a buyer does and one of the more useful.