Wild Goose Chase

Today, J and I embarked on an adventure that quickly turned into a wild goose chase. Our cute little house has about zero storage. When you are a first time home buyer, this is not something you typically pay attention to...well, we didn't. The kitchen has fantastic storage. Plenty of cupboard space for all our dishes and food and table cloths, etc. Love the kitchen.

Didn't notice until we moved in that the hall linen closet is only about a foot deep. No joke. It's probably 7-8 feet long, but only a foot deep. The master and guest bedrooms have decently sized closets. J and I are kind of cramped in our closet, but we have all of our clothes in there. We're not really the type of people who store their clothes seasonally...they all live in the closet all year long. The guest room closet is big enough for one person, but barely. I just store my extra sheets, etc. in there. The hall closet is not big enough for sheets and towels. Towels only. However, the third room (which will hopefully be a nursery one day) has a tiny closet that is directly behind the door. You can't get into that closet unless you go into the room and close the door. We don't even have a closet door...there is a curtain hiding the crap within.

The main bathroom has exactly one drawer. The medicine cabinet has plenty of space, though, and I put bulky stuff like my hair dryer under the sink. The master bath doesn't have a shower or a bath, just a toilet and sink. There are two drawers in that room, though, and the same mirrored medicine cabinet.

There is a small coat closet in the entryway of the house, that doubles as storage for our vacuum cleaner and ALL coats, gloves, scarves, winter boots, etc. and that's about it for storage in the entire house. We don't even have a laundry room. We have a laundry closet in the kitchen. It's just barely big enough for my king sized washer and dryer. Thank goodness I measured that correctly!!

Anyway, today's wild goose chase was for two dressers. We want a dresser for our bedroom and for the guest room. In the guest room I would move the linens to the dresser, and free up space in the closet for our suitcases and sleeping bags which get shoved under the bed in there for the time being. In our room, we have been using giant plastic stacking drawers - two each - for socks and underwear. Shorts, jeans, pajamas, sweaters, etc. all get folded on the one shelf. We have been holding out for a nice bedroom set with matching bed, night stands, and dressers, but our room is simply too small for all of that. We'll have to wait for our next house for that. We're at the point now where we just want two dressers. Almost all of the trim woodwork in our house is white, and our walls are mostly rich, vibrant colors. I LOVE the way white makes the colors pop, and just looks so clean. What I want, is a simple dresser. White. Deep drawers. That's it. Nothing fancy, nothing expensive. We figure we'll get decent stuff that will last. When we move (eventually we will leave the TriCities - we don't know when, but we know we will so we can be closer to our families), the dressers could go into a child's room or another guest room. Or even a craft room for storage of larger crafting items. Or even in a rec room.

Sounds like a good plan, right? We know what we want, we know that it will serve us for now, and we could still use them later. So we set out.

We started at ShopKo. They had a cute dresser advertised that I thought looked perfect. When we got there, we found that it was WAY smaller than it appeared to be. The drawers were very shallow, and we hated it. So off we went to Target. I usually love Target. Today, however, we were very disappointed again. They had one dresser that had potential, but again, the drawers were very shallow. So off we went to Fred Meyer. I usually don't shop at Fred Meyer. I don't know why, but I don't. However, we've seen some pretty decent stuff there, and we've been pleased with our purchases whenever we've been. (We just got some great storage boxes there on sale. We took them camping and they worked out beautifully! My MIL even said she was going to go get some like ours, because the clear was so much better than having to open every box looking for stuff.)

Strike three. Fred Meyer had exactly one dresser, and it was terrible. I know that the floor models are usually treated pretty roughly by a lot of people, but this was bad. I couldn't even open the top drawer more than an inch. Not only were the drawers shallow, but the quality did not look good, either.

We decided we would try one more place - we were off to WalMart. Once again, we struck out. How hard could it be?? I don't think I've got unreasonable standards...do I? Where do you suggest we try next? We would like to get something soon. If all else fails, I'll have to go visit his parents or mine and go to an IKEA. Most likely his parents. The IKEA in Portland is ginormous...it's like the Renton IKEA and a few Costcos tacked on for good measure. But I think we'll have to spend more than I would like, there. Any advice anyone could share would be fantastic. We're tired of no storage!