Storage

The house does not need a pull-down ladder for its attic because the loft has a door which leads directly into the attic. Actually, the door leads into a small walk-through closet which has a door on the other side that opens into the attic. As mentioned in the "Framing" section, we had specified an area of the attic outside this door which would be cleared of joist framing and would have plywood decking for additional storage.

A walk-in pantry provides a lot of convenience. Having all of the food stored in one place lets you see and get to everything at once. It makes unloading groceries easier.

A spice rack on the door increases storage space in the pantry enormously since all those little bottles can take a lot of shelf space. Putting them all in the rack makes them easier to find, too.

With the pantry right next to the food-prep area, it is easy to reach a spice, use it, and put it right back in the rack.



In the master closet, we had to choose where to have double poles (one clothes hanging pole up high and another down below it, which doubles the hanging space).

Since most of Kay's clothes are dresses which need more room to hang, we single-poled most of her side of the closet (on the right) and double-poled a smaller area where she can hang blouses and skirts.

Nelson's is just the opposite. Most of his space is double-poled for hanging shirts, and a smaller area is single-poled to allow room for hanging pants by the cuffs.

The carpenter didn't intend to put shelves above the clothes-hanging poles, but we requested them since we used that kind of shelf space in our last house. (Update: Good thing we insisted, since we use ALL that shelf space in the closet.)


Cabinets built into the closet provide room for socks, underwear, sweaters, etc. The cabinets are on either side of the closet door. We squeezed the last inch of storage space out of the closet by having the cabinet builder add a bridge over the door from one cabinet to the other.

In the picture, you can see the double-poled section on the left for Kay's short clothes and the single-poled section on the right for Nelson's slacks.

Both the guest bath's vanity and Nelson's vanity have a wall to the left of them, so there was no problem building the vanities into the walls. However, Kay's vanity butts up against a linen cabinet, so there was no choice but to build her medicine cabinet into the side of the linen cabinet. This worked out fine -- we don't even notice it when opening the linen cabinet.

In the bathrooms, we used white cultured marble with molded sinks for the counter tops and matching marble for the shower and whirlpool in the master bath. It worked well in our last houses.