If it's a bedroom that somebody is actually living and sleeping in, I'd suggest having something closet-like but it doesn't need to be architectural. I lived for 10 years with just a simple pax wardrobe and a dresser, and that was fine. In our current home the bedroom we we wanted to use as a master had no closet at all so we put in custom built-in wardrobes and that works great.

My sister did it for 20 years, with a great Pax wardrobe from Ikea. Never missed the closet. Her new home has a closet in the hallway outside her bedroom, and she's fine with that.

Thank you all for your input! Leaning towards the Pax wardrobe then, much easier than moving tearing down/moving walls :)

How large is the secondary bedroom and how is it currently used.

As others have suggested you can purchase "furniture" to hold clothing. I have a vintage bedroom suite and one of the units is an armoire.

The other option is to frame out a closet in the second bedroom which would depend on the size of the room. It wouldn't necessarily take more floor space than "furniture". This isn't particularly disruptive as a reasonably handy person could DIY like my father or a handyman type person if necessary.

My childhood home was built prior to WW I and had the standard extremely tiny closets. My parents just framed out closets that were adequate for normal storage needs. They just looked like the kind of standard closets with sliding doors that are pretty common. Mine still had the original little closet in the back and I would go in there as a teen to smoke pot. 🤣

When you sell your home, the room without a closet cannot be marketed as a bedroom without a closet.

Not sure where you are but that’s not true in Canada at least. Most codes do not require a closet to be legally considered a bedroom.

Atlanta, GA. Interesting. Didn't know the difference in the code for bedrooms.

FHA doesn't require there to be a fixed closet - perhaps some locations do but it would be location specific.

I think a window with egress is much more universal because it is life threatening to only have one exit from a room - especially a bedroom.

Developers will sometimes play games with bedrooms. In Los Angeles you need a certain number of parking spaces for each bedroom and so when my condo was built they deliberately didn't frame in the space where there *could* be a second bedroom. It has a door where you can enter from the hallway and when originally built it had a plastic accordian divider that you could shut to close off from the "living room". But it wasn't legally a bedroom so didn't trigger the requirement for a second parking space. And ironically there was a closet in the space. These style apartments were advertised as convertible "dens" and a lot of people have framed in where the plastic divider was so they can advertise as a second bedroom and theoretically get a higher price.

What qualifies as a bedroom for resale may depend on the local MLS, besides the fire and code requirements. It might state that a bedroom needs a window and a closet, or some such, because that's how people are searching. Nothing pissed me off more than wasting my time looking at a house that didn't meet my needs (thinking of the house that converted half the garage into a "bedroom" yet still advertised a two-car space, and no way to tell from the photos)