I guess we just have a smaller bed. Our bedroom is small but we just have a double sized bed. I don't even think a cal king would fit in the bedroom. We put clothes in the dressor (we have one tall one and one normal one with a mirror) The tall one is a door chest and holds a small tv also. then I just have a bench with storage at the end of the bed. That is about all we have in the room really.
My parents also have an older house and they have a dressor and an armoir and they are fine.
Dresses and suits and stuff like that go in the closet. Everything else is folded and put away. Stuff like bathing suits and summer clothing is put in a storage box for the winter when the sweaters are taken out.
anything that i don't wear, like old bridesmaids dresses or clothing that is "out of style" is given away before it gets a chance to even be pushed into the closet.
We don't have many shoes and those that we have are situated in the mudroom and porch.
Owning an old house has a way to making you par down your "stuff"
good luck
-renee

Like Scryn said, it gives you a perfect opportunity to purge and simplify. When I was single I had a 2/1 1929 Tudor bungalow. The two small closets (and even smaller coat closet) seemed to do OK. I had a chest in each bedroom for folded things and used bags under the beds (one queen, one double) alternatively for sweaters and summer items.

Then I got married! My DH had TWO walk-in closets full of clothes that had to be worked into the mix. We put one of those rubbermaid zippered closet things in the attic, but still had to purge a great deal. You can do it. You really can. If the item's season has come and gone once without it being worn, it can go.

We got down to one closet each plus the rubbermaid. When we moved from that place we had a third bedroom (third closet -- woohoo!) so lost the Rubbermaid.

We once lived in a house where one bedroom had a tiny closet under the attic steps that you couldn't even stand up in. The second bedroom had a closet that was also under the same attic steps. It had some hooks on the back wall, it wasn't deep enough for a rod. The third bedroom had no closet at all.That was all the closets in the whole house.
Fortunately there was a large downstairs sitting room that my parents turned into a bedroom and it was big enough to install a closet. My dad took a chunk out of the biggest bedroom upstairs and turned it into a closet for 2 of the bedrooms.

Congrats on the house! You will certainly learn some tricks of your own, but here's how I deal with my 760 sf 2 bedroom wee house. My bed's in the smaller of the two bedrooms and it's just the bed, nightstand and bookcase. Then the larger bedroom (which is on the noisier front of the house) is essentially a big closet. Two armoires as I otherwise have no hanging closet space. Can you use a bedroom as a closet? IKEA has lots of organizing ideas, even if you use something else. Then I got risers for my bed and equipped the underneath with rolling rubbermaid containers for bedding and that sort of stuff.

Always think of storage when remodeling. I took out the bad remuddle tile job in the bathroom and installed wainscoting. I built shelves in stud space for housing narrow items. Low buffet under the window in the dining room--more storage. That sort of thing. You'll get really good at it!

Thanks for the support, good to know I'm not alone. I'll have to get good at switching out summer and winter stuff, and force my husband, who always wears jeans, to get rid of the 15 pairs of dress pants he has. Good time to purge, and I'm ok with that!
Thanks!

I have three bedrooms with one small closet in two of them, none at all in the third. And no closets (or other built-ins) downstairs. It's tough!

I put wheeled racks in the attic: two open and one that zips closed, the latter for woolen coats and suits. The attic also houses plastic storage bins for out-of-season clothes. I have a cedar armoire downstairs for jackets and another in the upstairs hall for everyday clothes and shoes.

My bedroom is the one without a closet. Let me just say I have to fight a tendency to pile clothes up on my chair...

Susan

We have only two closets in our house (not including a broom closet in the kitchen), and before my husband-to-be moved in I built an armoire for him out of scrap lumber and then painted it. It is really cute - it looks old and rustic! It had to go in another room though, along with a dresser for him, because our bedroom is small - only a little over 7 feet wide. There's no way we could have a king or queen sized bed in the bedroom. We have a full size bed. One of the two closets holds all of our coats and jackets, some blankets and other stuff on shelves behind the coats; stuff on the floor too; the other closet has mostly my clothes and some other stuff, including the vacuum cleaner and one of those cheap cardboard "dressers" that you can buy at Kmart; the closet is crowded and often gets messy. It is necessary for us to have storage space in the basement, consisting of a very old arched-topped trunk that I've had since I was a kid, and a very cheap zippered armoire-thing I bought at Kmart. I also built for the bedroom a quasi-armoire shelf unit. I built it to put the cat litter box in it and the vacuum cleaner, although now it has my dresser in it (and no curtains; now I need to make doors for it) because I turned the bed around and then there was really no room in the bedroom!

We have this problem in both our current house and new one. Here I use the closet in the extra bedroom while my husband uses the tiny one in our room. We also have a large 7 drawer dresser (and a queen size bed). In the new house, the master closet is above the stairs with an awkward layout. We plan to turn an extra bedroom into a wardrobe room with rolling racks and will put our dresser in there.

One thing that helped me was moving up the top shelf so I could use double rods. I keep a stool handy to reach the top rod. Huz is tall so I put his stuff on the top rod. The few dresses I own go on one of those over the door hooks on the inside of the closet door.

I have antique beds so I use the underbed storage boxes. Those of you who can might consider a bed dresser.

We got rid of the guest room when we realized how much space we could reclaim for daily use. The room was converted into a dressing room, which includes a bureau, corner cupboard, blanket trunk, plenty of hooks on the walls, and a large full-length mirror. Two tiny closets were modified, adjusting the rods and adding shelving. My husband is on an earlier schedule than I am, but he no longer wakes me by turning on the closet light or opening and closing drawers. He often hangs his clothes out the night before, which reduces his time in getting ready for work.

As others have pointed out, it's helpful to purge the things you don't use, and organization is key. Creative use of space is something you do learn. It's all part of making a place your own. Enjoy your new home!

Tina

I live in a 1926 schoolhouse-there are NO closets. My bedroom is the boys cloakroom, only 7' wide x 11' long. A double bed just fits between the walls sideways at the far end of the room....with no head or foot board. There is enough room for a large double chest of drawers and a nightstand. The room is very tall-12' ceilings so it doesn't feel too small. Just outside the door in the great room (which was the classroom) stands a large wardrobe with a rod and two drawers. This worked rather well until my partner joined me 6 years ago. Now everything is more than a little crowded. I'd like to get a larger Mission style wardrobe.
There was a tiny room (6x8) added on the back of the school in the 40's as a chemical toilet room. The previous owners had cleaned it up and it was their 5 year olds bedroom. I retrofitted it with some closet organizer rod and shelves and use it for out of season clothing, sports equipment/clothing and misc. storage.

Wyndyacre: OH, how fun to live in an old schoolhouse! We live in a 1916 bungalow and we have HUGE closets. From what I read, I guess that is unusual. In fact two of our bedrooms have closets that measure 19 X 7. I was trying to envision these closets 8' shorter and used as a bedroom. In one of our closets we have two twins beds for our twin grandsons, and a crib for their baby brother. And there is still room for a dresser. All our closets are T/G cedar, so it's like camping out to them.

We use a smaller bed (a double) so we have room for two dressers. It's just the two of us here so the extra bedrooms have sofabeds to use for overnight guests and each one has a dresser that collects our overflow. DH also has a wardrobe in the basement laundry room that he uses. Anything that requires ironing never even makes it upstairs. It gets hung there till ironed and worn.

Thanks for all the great info. We're moving into an old farm house with the same closet problems. The bed room my son picked is the smallest and has no closet. There is a large closet upstairs in the hallway. I will definitly be utilizing these suggestions. The risers for the bed will be a big help. Plus if I put clothes under there maybe it will keep that area from becoming a catch-all.

In our master bedroom, there is one small closet with one door. I put a small cheap dresser in the closet for out of season clothes and shoes (last drawer) since we hang shirts only. We also got a dressers (the tall kind, not the wide kind) for each of us to keep our other clothes. For other things we store under the bed in boxes. We have a very nice dresser in the hall area to store linens and guest towels as well as a buffet table in the dining room. We also have a large trunk that is used as a coffee table. We keep large items in the basement in 2 areas we set up as storage rooms.