A Place for Everything

A government study recently revealed that Americans are saving less than at any time since the Great Depression. Truth be told, however, we're actually saving too much. It's just that what we're saving isn't money-it's stuff.

For most of us who hail from somewhere else, where there are higher elevations and lower water tables, the idea of stashing our hard-to-part-with possessions in the basement is hard-wired in our brains. Yet the soggy reality is that in Florida there are no basements.

Where do we store our stuff so that it's safe, unobtrusive and easily retrievable when needed? There are professionals who have the answers.

"Americans do have a lot of stuff. We certainly do," says Loyda Woods, owner of Orlando's California Closets franchise. "We just want to get it safely tucked away so we can go on with our lives."

Adds Chris Haley, a project manager for the architectural firm Looney Ricks Kiss, "There's space, and then there's effective space. In Florida, you can be paying $200 to $300 per square foot when you buy a home. If you're putting forth that kind of money, you want to make efficient use of every inch."

So, say Haley and others, the best defense against the onslaught of clutter is to designate space to accommodate it while planning your new home, or to retrofit space in your existing home by installing organizational systems.

Consider the closet. In its traditional three-foot-deep, one-shelf, one-rod incarnation, the unadorned closet is quickly becoming an anachronism. That's why sometimes elaborate closet systems are becoming standard on higher-end homes and popular options even on starter homes.

"Storage is a huge consideration, but as long as people can get really good-sized walk-in closets with high-end organizational systems, they're pretty happy with that," says Chocky Burks, a real estate agent who specializes in luxury homes. "It makes life easier and it's quicker to find things. And time, as well as space, is at such a premium."

Once customers try an organization system complete with custom cubbies and spaces, Woods says, they wonder how they ever got along without it.

"It becomes a necessity in their life," Woods notes. "It becomes something they don't want to live without, like the garage door opener. Do you really want to get out and open that garage door every day? Isn't it nice to have that little click-click to get into the garage?"

Although her most extravagant creation was a $72,000 closet, Woods says a typical customer will spend 1 to 1.5 percent of a home's construction cost on a master closet system. So a $300,000 home would require a $3,000 closet system, with most of the expense absorbed by built-in clothing drawers.

Before going to work, Woods' designers sit down with the homeowners, encourage them to purge as much as possible and inventory what's left.

Then the space is tailored to the remaining stuff, be it a woman's 300-plus pairs of shoes or a man's unwieldy ball-cap collection, which he wished to display in a custom nook under the staircase.

But perhaps Woods' most interesting job was outfitting the closets in a condominium complex within a nudist colony. "Talk about selling ice to the Eskimos," she says. "We were selling closets to people who wanted to walk around without any clothes on, so they needed to store everything. That was the coup de grace."

But even with a top-notch closet system, the space can accommodate only so much. Beyond clothes and kitchen supplies, what is one to do with the Christmas ornaments, family heirlooms and other collections of knick-knacks?

In the course of designing the Builder Magazine Reality House in Celebration and the Southern Living Idea House in Victoria Park, Haley says, market research helped architects zero in on typical storage frustrations: kitchen islands cluttered with daily mail and newspapers, family cars squeezed out of overloaded garages and bulk purchases of food and household items from warehouse stores piled everywhere.

Two solutions incorporated into these showcase homes were what Haley calls the "Liver Room," which is an anatomical reference not to be confused with, and quite the opposite of, the living room, and the "Florida Basement," which isn't really a basement at all in the traditional sense.

"Sometimes the hearth is considered the heart of the home," says Haley. "The kitchen and the computer space are the brains. But in order for the whole house to function, you need something to filter out the impurities, and we call that the liver."

In the Reality House, the liver is an anteroom entered from the garage-the main entrance for many homeowners-which serves as a catchall for the coats, cell phones, book bags, mail and other paraphernalia that would otherwise wind up littered throughout the house.

In a multimillion-dollar home, this anteroom can be a small office; in a more modest new home or a retrofitted older home, a small closet with bifold doors or even a niche big enough for a desk can serve a similar filtering function.

For stuff that doesn't come and go but stays put, there's the Florida basement, which was incorporated into the Idea House. This so-called basement is actually more of an attic: a small, room-sized space upstairs toward the back. Haley says Florida basements can also be created out of "bonus rooms," which are otherwise often used as dens or family rooms.

"We've never seen anybody come back to us and say, 'Man, there's too much storage in this house,'" Haley says. "If there's a space or a closet or a shelf, they'll find something to put on it. You don't have to worry about that."

And that includes the garage. Nick St. George, owner of Garage Design Works, says high-end garage storage is a fast-growing niche that has taken off in the past two years with what he calls a "landslide of quality products" that allow homeowners to replace flimsy pegboards and do-it-yourself plyboard shelves.

"The quality is a big driver behind what we're seeing in the garage," says St. George. "Most of the new cabinets come with lifetime warranties. For years, whatever you bought for the garage either sagged or warped over a short amount of time, and seemed to be a short-term storage solution. Now we can offer long-lasting products."

Also driving the trend is the surge in home values. That means people are willing to invest more in home improvements of all kinds.

"A garage can be almost one-third of the square footage of a home when you have a two- or three-car garage," notes St. George. "And with the average home at over $200,000 in Orlando now, that amount of square footage to just have a concrete slab where you can put your car isn't a good use of your investment."

Today's garage storage systems are made of powder-coated steel or premium wood, including rolling cabinets, overhead shelves and horizontal track walls to hold heavy tools and sports equipment.

St. George says most of his customers live in homes with three- to five-car garages and pay an average of $4,500 for full storage systems. A more typical homeowner with a two-car garage would likely spend closer to $3,000 for a reasonably comprehensive system, he adds.

St. George says he finds that customers generally want space in their garages for holiday ornaments and trees, dog carriers and other possessions that would have gone into the attic, had there been one.

Counterintuitively, packrats are not his typical customers. "A lot of our customers are, by definition, more organized," St. George says. "If they're interested in systems in the garage, they're probably a certain personality type-people who don't have a lot of clutter. They just want to stay on top of it."