Hidden spaces

I really need to get a handle on some of the storage issues in my house. It seems as though no matter where I've ever lived, there have always been places that I didn't want to public to see because they were such a mess. My mother always had a "junk drawer" and that was the place everything went when we had no idea where else it should go, and I imagine all houses have some places like that. But in my house I seem to have "junk rooms", which is a bit disconcerting.

Last weekend I worked on cleaning out my sun porch, which is one of those rooms. It's off of the living room and can be closed off from the rest of the house with french doors, so it tends to be the resting place for all things paper and generally "junky". I have my home office out there with the computer, so its one of the most used rooms in the house - and thus a constant annoyance to me. But when unexpected guests pull into the driveway and the kitchen is a mess, or an item is sitting out on a chair or a table somewhere and I have no idea what to do with, it ends up on the sun porch. Every few months I do a clean-up and it looks really nice for a couple weeks. And then the piles start appearing again.

There's also a front entrance that's never used and tools seem to have a way of finding their way to that space. No one ever uses the front door anymore so it's not a huge problem, but I've had nightmares about trying to get out of the house in a fire and not being able to get to the door. Again, it gets cleaned periodically...but then in a few months....

Of course there's my bedroom, which I've addressed in the past here and is another embarrassing source of frustration for me - boxes piled on boxes that store needed linens and seasonal items.

The biggest problem we have in this house is that it was built in 1920 so they're tiny little closets and the basement gets wet so we can't store things down there. The attic, which is a nice big space, is difficult to access with its pull-down ladder in the middle of the upstairs hallway. I envy the big dry basements my daughters have, where they enjoy finished family rooms or nice laundry areas. We are not so lucky.

I keep telling myself that someday we'll add on to this house and have a nice walk-in closet for our clothes with some additional storage for the clutter that seems to haunt me. But I secretly wonder if that will solve the problem. Because I think if I were just more capable of throwing things in the trash to begin with - rather than holding on to them for some unknown future use - our storage issues would be resolved.

Well - in any case, it's a home that's well lived in and filled with love, so if there are messy places around various corners so be it. Sometimes, you just can't have it all!