What’s So Great About a Closet Anyways?
Nov. 12, 2004

by Laurel E. Anderson
What’s so great about a closet anyways? Well, you’ll never know until you have to go without one. In the summertime it rarely gets used anyways right? But now we are well into fall and I no longer have a front hall closet and this is causing me a small amount of grief.

Hindsight tells me that we should have ‘planned’ the closet renovation in the summer when we really wouldn’t miss it but the argument against that was that, well, it was summertime and who wanted to spend endless hours inside a front hall closet when one could be out on the patio enjoying cocktails?

None of that matters now as the shoes, rain boots and other miscellaneous footwear scatter my front hall like fall leaves in the yard except that the leaves scattered outside look pretty and my front hall does not. And the coats, they are everywhere. On the backs of chairs and draped on the couch in the living room-both no no’s at my house. But no one wants to trek upstairs to get a coat and a pair of shoes every time they get ready to go out and that is why my living room looks like ‘backstage’ at a fall couture fashion show in Paris without the exotic flair.

This would all be okay if it was only for a short while. A short while really isn’t all that long. A week, ten days tops I could live with but we are now into a month at our house and still, no front hall closet or powder room for that matter. Yeah, everyone has to truck upstairs to use the loo too, which brings me to another problem that this extended renovation is causing me. I now have to keep at least one of the upstairs bathrooms clean which is no small feat with two children and a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy that thinks his purpose at our house is to make area rugs wherever he roams.

My contractor aka husband John, tells me daily that we are getting there, that these things take time. What things I ask? Apparently there are steps to wall repair and they require many hours of drying time between coats. My answer is hey, speaking of coats, I just want to hang a few in the closet. He has also pointed out that it is near impossible to work on the project remotely. Yes, my contractor has been traveling a bit lately which is another reason that things have gone behind schedule. Apparently you can’t telecommute in the carpentry industry.

My worse fear, just between us, is that the project isn’t finished before winter and the idea of winter coats mixed in with decorative pillows and throw blankets in the living room is not my idea of a festively decorated holiday home. I don’t think my son will be impressed when he finds out that his coat is doubling as a skirt around the Christmas tree!

But I have not lost hope. I refuse to. There have been many visits to both Home Depot and Rona as we work towards wrapping up this project and I have the invoices to back it up. And I know that my recurring nightmare, which shows me, invoices crumpled in my hand, complaining at the customer service desk about my small home reno being nowhere near complete (they will of course think I am insane as I never actually hired them to do the work; I just bought the supplies there) will end soon, just as soon as I have a place to lay my hat. Doesn’t the song go something like ‘wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home?’

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