It’s an odd situation at our house. With two new tenants of the infant variety, things are piling up in the corner of each room pretty quickly. Our house, nearly a century old, has one major shortcoming – storage and closets. Other than some very small closets in each of the three bedrooms upstairs, we have no storage. That’s right – NO storage on the main floor. No closets, no cubby holes, no space under the stairs……nothing. So things just sit in corners or in piles. It drives us nuts. It’s an odd problem: we have enough living space in square feet, but a lot of it is taken up by crap that should be stored away.

Solutions: what about the basement? Well, the basement could work, but Maynard as a whole is a fairly wet town. Our basement doesn’t flood, per say, but ground water does rise up and gets easily taken away by two sump pumps. The result is a musty smelling and humid basement where stuff gets mildewey. Is “mildewey” a word? Don’t know. So the basement could be a solution. With that, we’ve hired a New Hampshire company to come in early October and install a rather detailed system to regulate temperature, keep it dry and avoid that musty thing. They actually will be jackhammering out the concrete around the perimeter of the basement and installing drains. They’ll also add a more exquisite sump pump system to replace the two Ace Hardware-type pumps we have today. Finally, they’ll also integrate a high-end dehumidifier into the system. They guarantee the whole thing for life. So once the basement is up to snuff, we’ll get some shelving and rock the space we have down there.

But what of the upstairs? My wife doesn’t have a closet for her clothes and shoes. Another possible solution: an addition. We’ve been talking with a contractor who proposed an unbelievably cool idea – a three-level addition. Basement level would be a two-car garage, first floor an additional family room with storage/closets galore and a 4th bedroom in the house. We LOVED it! Then we saw that it would actually cost MORE than we paid for the house. Drats. We’ll have to scale it down if we pursue it.

Or we could move. I think we see this as a last resort, given that we love the house and have put SO much into it to make it home. But it certainly remains a possibility and we’ve begun exploring the dreadful world of realtor.com and the thought of moving. Sigh.

We’ll see where it all goes……..