Is this room plan design idea clumsy and unworkable?

kids 50cm bike image

Ms_S

My husband and I are currently designing the floor plan of our house. And he is driving me crazy with constantly changing his mind and switching aound rooms and saying, oh put this here, take out that, make that bigger etc. Because he is the fantasy I am the practical. For example he'll say, oh put all the bedrooms on one side, but when I tell him we have a 10m wall and 3 bedrooms and 4 walls eating into that 10m space totalling 90cm then the bedrooms are going to be like sausages.
Anyway, his new thought is that between two rooms both of about 4m deep we put a storage room, like a deep skinny storage closet. So this storage room would be a clean 1.5m by 4m with no windows and one acess door at the 1.5m side (his idea not mine). So I told him not only would you need a heck of a lot of lighting to see whats in there, but you could only put things along one wall, for about 1m so you could have about a 50cm skinny foot space to walk down the 4m of the room to see what you have and have access to it all. I personally think its unworkable and just odd.
What do you think...if it was say a clean 2m wide do you think that would work or the idea is just stupid?
The reason was, we as a family really need a storage room, which I had designed to be by the front door so you could straight away put in the prams (2 kids, one 2 one not born yet lol), then later on bikes and other stuff, coat hooks on the wall for hooks, suitcases and winter clothes/summer clothes, sports equipment you know all that. And at present by the front door, my storage room eats into our box shape living room making it into an L shape. I just liked the idea of it being by the front door mainly for coats, prams, and for future...bikes...idea

Lol, so if I haven't confused you, mainly what's your opinion on my husbands idea...the skinny deep sausage storage room?
Thanks for your help. Unfortunately the land is our problem, our house is built on a massive slope so we can only have one entrance on that one wall, the opposite end will be a drop. You see we are building 2 stories, our floor is top floor with the top road access, and the bottom floor is my brother-in-laws place with the lower road acess. So no back door for us. And unfortunately no rubber-maid stuff, because it would look unsightly at the front of the house and we live in Greece so they dont sell that stuff :( . But I'm glad for the second opinion backing me up on thinking that my husbands storage place idea is unworkable.
Hi, thanks again for the input! You gave me a great idea to make my bedroom bigger whilst still keeping the walls flush with the others...eat into the next room and put our ensuite and walk-in there! Brilliant! I am going to have to fiddle about but I think its all do-able, and I think I will make that front door storage space just big enough for say a pram, some stacked boxes and hanging coats, and allocate storage elsewhere say in my laundry and our walk-in.
Its funny, just when you get to the point when there is no more fiddling you could possibly do! lol

Answer
I agree that it would soon become very difficult to retrieve items, as others got tossed in on top of them, but I see the problem with an l-shaped living room, as well.

Is there any way the storage could actually go outside the front door, rather than inside it? Rubbermaid makes several pretty good weather tight storage minis that would fit along a back wall. Others are available, of course. Just search for outdoor storage.

Since this is a new construction and a house, arrange the space so that you routinely enter the back door rather than the front, and the front entry and living room stay nice for guests and for living in. We had a similar problem, and just coming in a different door helped us sort it all out. We had a "mud room" at the back door, and that's where sports gear and hats, coats, gloves, and so on were stowed in easy reach yet still out of sight.

ADDED AS AN EDIT AFTER THE "NO BACK DOOR" EXPLANATION: I see....yes, the outside storage is not going to work at all. I agree with you, though. The "hallway" space would have what-ever you used most recently at the front, and what-ever you needed to use next somewhere along the back. Unless you are positively obsessive about order, it wouldn't take long....

How about turning the hallway sideways - a wall devoted to storage with sliding or bifold doors so that you could get into the entire space by opening the right set of doors? (Prams behind one set, hats and coats behind a second, rain or bad weather gear behind a third) prefer bifold to sliding, because they fold open and out of the way, where sliding doors only allow access to half the space at any one time. A long line of slender panel doors might add some interest to an otherwise blank bland wall. This is how we "hid" our laundry in plain sight in a kitchen.

The solution avoids the L shaped rooms, and avoids the accessibility issues.

Second edit - the second poster mentioned a staircase. The space UNDER the stairs might be perfect for storage. with french close doors (both singing out from the middle, opening a wider space) or bifold doors.

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Title Post: Is this room plan design idea clumsy and unworkable?
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