One closet adjoins each fireplace; additional closets make "use of other nooks and crannies in a remarkable utilization of space for its time," according to Merritt Ierley in Open House: A Guided Tour of the American Home 1637-Present.
For most of the 19th century American houses were typically built without closets, according to Ierley. Until the early 1800s, "personal wealth had not changed materially" from earlier years and families could easily fit their belongings into chests, highboys, trunks or in attics. The exceptions belonged to well-heeled showoffs like George Read, who had four closets built into the master bedroom of the elaborate, expensive brick mansion he had erected in New Castle, Delaware in 1804.
The first warehouse for household and personal items is built in England, giving ship passengers a place to keep stuff during long journeys away from home.
"The bedroom is as much dominated by the wardrobe and the chest-of-drawers as by the bed; the dining-room as much by the china-cabinet as by the table; even the old-fashioned kitchen was dominated by that obsolete piece of furniture, the dresser, while the modern kitchen often appears to consist of nothing but an array of cupboards from floor to ceiling and wall to wall."
Australian company introduces the Esky Auto Ice Box, metal precursor to the now-ubiquitous plastic, foam and vinyl beer coolers, thus enabling modern life as we know it today.
The July issue of House Beautiful magazine ignores the growing Communist threat to focus on the real problem facing Americans—the shortage of household storage space—and devotes 26 pages to solving crisis.
“No sooner do we add a new cabinet or a few shelves than they are filled to overflowing. Call our society acquisitive or affluent, the result is the same—an accumulation of equipment and materials that must be stored at the point of use for best operation of the household.
"We are only now beginning to realize that our storage needs have far outrun the traditional clothes closets and kitchen cabinets with which the ordinary house is equipped. Every room in the house now requires its own put-away space. The problem is so great that halfway measures will not suffice. Only major solutions, and many of them, will work," the editors warn.
The National Association of Professional Organizers is founded in Los Angeles by Beverly Clower, Stephanie Culp, Ann Gambrell, Maxine Ordesky and Jeanie Shorr.
Get Organized Week, a clever NAPO marketing vehicle, launches in October 2003. In 2005 the commerical observance moves to January to become the even more brilliant and brazen Get Organized Month.
NAPO's successful ploy spurs lazy journalists to give NAPO members many opportunities to be quoted in scores of how-to-get-organized articles nationwide. By 2007 a happy NAPO has nearly 4,000 members, several satisfied sponsors and millions of potential customers still wrestling with too much stuff.
