Does a closet make it a bedroom?

In the 18 months, two years, builders have been busy making Holding Village from the last of a thousand-acre farm, my husband has usually incorporated a tour of the most recent buildings in his nightly walk down Friendship Chapel Road.

So it was not surprising when he came home one night with a brochure from an open house for a new town house. I looked at it and said, “There aren’t any closets in the bedrooms!” But there was, however, a note in the brochure that offered to build closets for an increase in the purchase price.

I found the lack of closets shocking. Where are people going to put all their clothes and their “things,” the pickleball or golf equipment, the vacuum cleaner, the dirty clothes hamper, the towels and linens and blankets for the beds, . . .

One nasty thought I had was that the people building all the new storage units everywhere were in cahoots with today’s closet-less builders, but I brushed that aside.

Now, I grew up in a bedroom in Redfield, N.Y. that was closetless. My bedroom was the last vestige of the four-room house my parents bought and expanded into a three-bedroom, one bath house in the 1930s. The bedroom was at the end of a short hall, and there was a pretty long step down to get into it. The door was original with the house, and my “closet” was an extended hanger on its back. But then, I did not have a lot of clothes and most could go in drawers.

Ten, 15 years ago and forward, when I and other local women baby-sat the houses for the Parade of Homes and made $20 an afternoon for the Wake Forest Women’s Club, we saw what the builders in Heritage and other subdivisions were doing for closets — building big!

Almost every house had a first-floor master bedroom with a full attached and large bathroom and a his-and-her’s closet, often a full room, not just shutter doors along a wall.

Back home, our house, built in 1838, is an example how closets grew. There were no closets in the original three rooms — living room with fireplace, smaller room behind it with fireplace and upstairs bedroom over the living room with fireplace. The first family had mother, father and six children.

After three more owners, in 1863 the Chappell family moved in and stayed for 100 years. Around 1900, when there were three generations in the three rooms, they built a tacked-on addition with two bedrooms, a hall and a new set of stairs. The bedrooms still had a fireplace each, but now they flanked the interior fireplaces and chimneys with closets with doors. Quite smart-looking for the times, but small.

We have stuck closets and cupboards and bookcases where we can, but nothing to match those spacious houses we baby-sat.

I wondered if the Town of Wake Forest’s planning or building codes had anything requiring closets. No, I was told.

But Marvin Weathers, the supervisor of the Code Enforcement Section of the Inspections Department, did give me the description of a bedroom or sleeping room and a valuable tip.

” We go by how the space is designated on the plans. To be approved as a bedroom it shall have not less than one operable emergency escape and rescue opening (Egress Window), and a smoke detector installed within the bedroom and one in the immediate vicinity outside of the bedroom.”

We have a smoke and carbon monoxide detector just outside our bedroom. We will soon have one in the bedroom, and you might add one too. That tip was worth all the thought I gave to the question: Does a bedroom have to have a closet?