Your ideas are promising, but I also love to play with spaces, so here's some of mine - What about first putting up shelves on the 2.5' wall on the left of the door to help that clutter, maybe with hooks under the bottom one (3' high?) for umbrellas, or a stand there. Then move the coats right to the back along the 3 & 2' walls (in one line vs separated by a door) with shelving above. On the 4' right wall would be a big organizer thingy, either open or closed, for maybe larger items that need storage (aside from what's in there now), and with proper handy racks for shoes - off the floor.

Thanks fellow KTers; I appreciate the help more than you could know! Georgysmom - Black and sleek would be so me, but would not work in this rough and tumble house filled to overflowing with a large, active DH and his even more active, large hunting dogs! Believe me, I've Houzzed, and Pinterested, and Googled imaged until I'm blue in the face. White baseboards and trim seem to be the expected now. I've learned the hard way, with my three "bed" rooms that "white" does not stay "white," even with constant diligence! The trim in this room will be unstained oak. Also, most homes are built with some rhyme or reason to where there can be closets, doors, etc., and some sense of scale and balance. I have a suspicion the people who built this house in 1952, and remodeled in the late 70s, were a bit tipsy. Jim-1, Party Music50, JemDandy, You guys nailed it. Consistency. And making it work for my situation. I think the door choices has jelled in my mind. I do want them to blend in. They are in no way "features!" This is on old, plain house in an old, plain neighborhood and town. I am hoping for "clean, dry, and serviceable" with a large dose of friendliness, welcoming, and basic comfort. The new heat pump/furnace/air conditioning system has added the real comfort and is the catalyst for all this spiffing up. The trim and baseboards will be oak, unstained and finished to match the light floor. The baseboard molding is rather plain, about 5" tall. The oak window/door trim has a slight, non-descript molding to it. I think the doors should be the same satin finish, unstained oak, as the floor and new trim. This is a well used room; it's a TV viewing room / sitting room just off of the kitchen. Two-thirds of the room is "living room" with a tiny "breakfast nook" at the south end, next to the closet area. It has 8' ceilings. There are two windows, two open doorways, and the front and closet door in this room. I'm afraid the "artsy" painted doors I was envisioning would come off looking rather "college dorm" and lock me into only one wall color/furniture choice. I think using the light oak will keep everything subdued. Do you think the visual weight of these close-set doors will be counter-balanced by the media cabinet and two 6' tall bookcase/cabinets I have planned to center on the opposite north wall? My walls are painted a soft sage green; the ceiling is white. I think the crown molding will be white, too; but that will be another conversation posting.

That's not nearly as strange as what was in the house where I grew up. My grandfather and great grandfather built the house in 1932 and did the wiring themselves, which was something of a novelty back then in rural central Texas. They had to have their own generator for electricity, as they were not on the grid. Anyway, their wiring was pretty screwy, and they put a light switch in one of the bedroom closets. Therefore, if you got up in the middle of the night and found yourself lost in the closet (which happened to my brother who sleep-walked), you could turn the bedroom light on from inside the closet. That didn't help much if the closet door was closed. That bedroom also had a window to the bathroom, and so my mother put curtains on both sides of it. Later she closed the bedroom side of the window and put shelves on the bathroom side. The bedroom also had a total of five doors (including the closet door) - one to a central hall, two to the other bedrooms, and one to the outside with a large porch. A lot of people would think that it was the main door to the house and knock on that door instead of the front or back door. There was also a switch in the main bedroom that would turn off the outlets to the middle bedroom. Lars

Well...my $0.02 USD worth is: --Having a design where a house unfolds as one progresses through the public spaces is always a good concept...the trick is to actually have it work. You house "unfolds" as one turns to the right and moves toward the living room...after entering the front door and seeing the dreaded closet door. --Looking from the entry, through a corridor, and seeing the exterior beyond is not a bad thing at all, IMO. But your visitors won't typically move that way. Won't they typically turn right from the entry and move towards the living room? And even if they move straight ahead, towards the kitchen area, there's an intervening space between the entry and the kitchen which can easily be designed with lower ceiling as another "unfolding" space. Simple. --Now for the entry closet: "...we have handled this same condition in a few of our custom homes in similar fashion and has proven very successful each time . . . " A picture is worth a thousand words, and an actual site visit to such an existing custom home is worth several thousand words. Ask for about 5,000 to 10,000 words of visual explanation. All of the doors pictured are simply (expensive) doors. They are just doors! I, for one, would never want, nor design, a house with an entry door which directly faced a closet door. Of. Any. Kind. There are so many more interesting and imaginative things for an intial impression of a custom house, IMO. For example: An entry featuring art and natural light at the end of the tunnel: Or, for something completely different, a floor to ceiling collection of books: ...Or an imaginative collection of anything which represents the Worthy family and some of the things they hold dear... Almost anything one can think of, imaginatively arranged, will be immeasurably better than a closet door. Any. Closet. Door.