One of the interesting things about renovating a small house is that every time one problem begins to disappear, another decision immediately moves to the front of the queue.
For the last few weeks, most of our attention has been concentrated on the kitchen.
It is now almost finished.
The cabinets are in, the worktops are in place, the appliances are being integrated, and what remains is largely dependent on the electrician completing the final connections and electrical work.
That is an important milestone for us because this first little house is gradually ceasing to look like a construction project and beginning to look like somewhere we can actually live.
And that means it is time to move to the next room.
The bedroom.
From kitchen cabinets to bedroom cabinets
The immediate bedroom project is the wardrobe.
We have now received the first sketch of what it could look like, and I find this stage of the process surprisingly interesting.
At first glance, a wardrobe seems like an uncomplicated object.
You build a large box against the wall, put some shelves inside it, add a rail for clothes and perhaps a few drawers, install the doors, and you are finished.
Except that once you actually have the opportunity to design one specifically for yourself, it rapidly becomes obvious that the difficult question is not how large the wardrobe should be.
The difficult question is:
what exactly should happen inside every centimetre of it?
The sketch we received is already a good starting point. There are two large hanging sections, shelves above them, a narrower central storage column, drawers and additional compartments closer to the floor.
Structurally, it makes sense.
But a drawing can tell us where a shelf could go. It cannot tell us whether that shelf will still seem like a good idea after six months of actually using it.
One decision is already made: all the way to the ceiling
There is one part about which I have very little doubt.
I want the wardrobe to go all the way to the ceiling.
I have never really understood the logic of stopping a large fitted wardrobe twenty or thirty centimetres below the ceiling and leaving a strip of completely useless space above it.
That space inevitably becomes one of three things.
It remains empty and collects dust.
It acquires boxes, suitcases and miscellaneous objects that permanently look as though somebody forgot to finish putting them away.
Or it gets covered with a decorative panel whose main purpose is to conceal the fact that usable volume has been discarded.
None of those options particularly appeals to me.
This is not an especially unconventional principle. Modern fitted-storage systems increasingly treat the full height of a room as usable volume.
IKEA, for example, explicitly starts its wardrobe-planning guidance by asking people to measure from floor to ceiling as well as wall to wall. Its ceiling-supported ELVARLI system takes the idea even further, using adjustable vertical posts specifically to exploit space from the floor towards the ceiling.
Our wardrobe will be custom made, so we are not constrained by the standard dimensions of a modular furniture system.
That makes the argument for using the entire height even stronger.
Not everything has to be reachable every morning
Of course, putting storage close to the ceiling raises an obvious objection.
You cannot comfortably reach it.
But that assumes that everything in a wardrobe has to be equally accessible.
It doesn't.
There are things we use every day: shirts, trousers, underwear, socks and the clothes currently in regular rotation.
There are things we use occasionally.
And there are things that may be needed only a few times per year.
Extra bedding, seasonal clothing, travel bags, spare pillows, blankets and other bulky items do not need to occupy the most valuable ergonomic positions simply because they need somewhere to live.
The top of the wardrobe is therefore useful precisely because it is inconvenient.
It gives us a place for the objects that should remain available without competing with everyday storage.
That division between frequently used and infrequently used space is one of the principles I increasingly want to follow throughout the house.
Then I discovered the disappearing ironing board
The most entertaining discovery happened only yesterday.
We were discussing the wardrobe and the possibility came up of installing an integrated ironing board inside it.
I had honestly never heard of this before.
My immediate reaction was: why have I not seen this everywhere?
The concept is wonderfully simple.
Instead of having a conventional folding ironing board permanently occupying some inconvenient corner of the house, a purpose-built mechanism lives inside the cabinetry.
When the board is needed, it pulls or folds out into the room.
When the ironing is finished, it folds back into the wardrobe and essentially disappears.
There are commercial mechanisms designed specifically for this purpose. Some fit into a relatively narrow wardrobe module and use sliding hardware to pull the board forward before it unfolds into its working position.
It is one of those very small pieces of domestic engineering that solves several problems simultaneously.
The real advantage is not the ironing
Initially, the obvious benefit is space.
A conventional ironing board is surprisingly large for an object that spends perhaps 99 per cent of its life doing absolutely nothing.
When folded, it remains long and awkward. It rarely fits naturally into normal cupboards. It gets placed behind a door, against a wall, beside a wardrobe, inside a utility room or wherever somebody can find a narrow enough gap.
Then every time you want to use it, there is a sequence.
Retrieve it.
Carry it somewhere.
Open it.
Move something else because there is not enough room.
Iron.
Close it.
Carry it back.
Find somewhere to hide it again.
Embedding the board inside the wardrobe eliminates most of that.
Conventional ironing board
Store somewhere
↓
Carry into room
↓
Open and position
↓
Iron
↓
Fold
↓
Carry away
↓
Store somewhere again
Integrated wardrobe board
Open wardrobe
↓
Pull out / unfold
↓
Iron
↓
Fold away
↓
Close wardrobe
But for me, there is another advantage that may be even more important.
It controls clutter.
I increasingly want everything to have a home
Renovating this house has made me think much more about clutter than I expected.
Partly this is because the house itself is small.
In a large home, one can get away with poor organisation for a remarkably long time. Objects migrate into spare rooms, cupboards, garages, basements and storage areas.
In a small house, there is nowhere for bad storage decisions to hide.
An object without a defined home becomes visible very quickly.
An ironing board is a perfect example.
If it does not have somewhere specifically designed for it, it will almost certainly end up leaning against something else.
The same applies to vacuum cleaners, cleaning equipment, laundry baskets, shoes, bags, chargers, tools and all the other mundane objects that constitute real life but somehow disappear from photographs of beautifully designed interiors.
I am beginning to think that good interior design is not primarily about what a room looks like immediately after somebody finishes decorating it.
The real test is what it looks like six months later, while people are actually living there.
So the integrated ironing board appeals to me not because ironing suddenly became exciting, but because it gives one awkward object a permanent, engineered place in the house.
Open the wardrobe, use it, put it away.
Nothing needs to remain standing in the bedroom afterwards.
The difficult decisions are inside
The exterior dimensions of the wardrobe are becoming relatively straightforward.
The room tells us how wide it can be.
The ceiling tells us how high it can be.
Normal clothes hangers and the doors establish much of the required depth.
The difficult work is the internal allocation.
How much hanging space?
How much shelving?
How many drawers?
How deep should the drawers be?
Should shelves be equal heights, or should some compartments be deliberately larger?
How much space should be allocated to shoes?
Where should bedding go?
Which items should be at eye level?
How much long-hanging space do we genuinely require?
And, perhaps most importantly, how much of today's storage pattern will still make sense five years from now?
A wardrobe is really an allocation problem
This is where my engineering brain inevitably becomes involved.
A wardrobe is essentially a constrained resource-allocation problem.
There is a known outer volume.
Inside that volume are competing requirements.
Hanging clothes need horizontal width and vertical clearance.
Folded clothes need shelf area.
Small objects benefit from drawers.
Shoes want shallow, low storage.
Seasonal objects can tolerate poor accessibility.
An ironing board consumes a narrow vertical or horizontal module but eliminates the need to store a much larger loose object somewhere else.
And every centimetre assigned to one function is a centimetre unavailable to another.
This is exactly why simply copying somebody else's wardrobe design is unlikely to produce the best result.
There are useful dimensions — but no universal answer
There are established planning ranges that help.
For a conventional wardrobe with clothes hanging perpendicular to the back panel, an internal depth around 55 to 60 centimetres is common. Short hanging zones for shirts and jackets typically need roughly 90 to 110 centimetres of clear vertical space, while long coats or dresses require considerably more.
Those numbers are useful because they prevent obviously bad decisions.
A wardrobe can look perfectly proportioned on a drawing and still be infuriating in daily use if shirts touch the shelf underneath, a drawer cannot open because of nearby furniture, or the internal depth is insufficient for normal coat hangers.
But the more I read about wardrobe design, the more obvious another point becomes:
the correct dimensions ultimately depend on what we own.
A person with thirty dresses needs a completely different wardrobe from someone whose clothes are predominantly shirts, trousers and folded jumpers.
A collection of twenty pairs of shoes changes the design.
Large suitcases change it.
The proportion of clothes we prefer to hang rather than fold changes it.
Even the number of drawers becomes a behavioural question rather than a furniture question.
Adjustability may be more valuable than optimisation
One idea I particularly like is making at least some of the shelving adjustable.
It is tempting when building custom furniture to optimise everything perfectly.
A shelf for this.
A drawer for that.
A compartment precisely dimensioned for some particular object.
There is a danger in doing too good a job.
If every section is fixed permanently around the possessions we happen to own in August 2026, then the wardrobe becomes less useful when our needs change.
Professional wardrobe-planning guidance frequently recommends adjustable shelves for exactly this reason: the interior can be reconfigured as the contents change rather than locking the owner into the original arrangement.
I think the best wardrobe for us will probably combine both approaches.
Some things can be fixed because their function is unlikely to change: drawers, hanging rails and the integrated ironing-board mechanism.
Other areas should probably remain adjustable.
Perhaps we should inventory our clothes first
The more I think about it, the more I suspect that the next step should not actually involve furniture at all.
It should involve our clothes.
Before approving the final design, we probably need to look properly at what we intend to put inside it.
Not approximately.
Actually count and categorise it.
How many shirts?
How many jackets?
How many long garments?
How much folded clothing?
How many shoes?
What belongs in drawers?
What should be stored elsewhere?
What only needs to be accessible seasonally?
That exercise will probably tell us more about the correct interior configuration than another hour staring at a CAD drawing.
Small house, carefully used space
This wardrobe also connects with a larger idea behind the renovation of our little house in Chișinău.
We know it is small.
We are not trying to pretend otherwise.
Instead, I would rather make the space work extremely well.
Underfloor heating removes the need to organise rooms around conventional radiators.
Good insulation makes the shell more efficient and comfortable.
The kitchen uses its walls carefully.
The wardrobe can exploit the full height of the bedroom.
The ironing board can disappear into the furniture instead of becoming another object requiring floor space.
Individually, none of these things is revolutionary.
Together, they determine how comfortable a relatively compact house actually feels.
From a sketch to something we will use every day
So, for the moment, we have a sketch.
It already looks promising.
I like the broad division into two hanging areas with a central storage section. I like using the height above the hanging zones. I like the drawers below. And I am now unexpectedly enthusiastic about finding a place for an integrated ironing board.
But I do not think we are ready to approve the internal design yet.
The number of shelves, the number and depth of drawers and the exact division between hanging and folded storage need more thought.
And that is probably worth the time.
Once the carpenter builds it, changing our minds will become substantially more expensive than moving a line on a drawing.
The wardrobe will also be one of the most heavily used pieces of furniture in the house.
We will open it every morning.
We will close it every evening.
We will discover very quickly whether the drawers are too shallow, the shelves too numerous, the hanging space too short or some supposedly clever compartment impossible to use.
So I am quite happy to spend a little longer thinking about it now.
The renovation is becoming more detailed
There is also something satisfying about reaching this stage.
Not long ago the questions around this house were about insulation, heating, walls, ceilings and construction.
They were fundamental questions about making the building habitable.
Now we are discussing how many sock drawers we need and whether an ironing board can disappear into the wardrobe.
That may sound trivial.
For me, it is evidence of progress.
The major construction decisions are slowly giving way to decisions about actually living there.
The kitchen is nearly done.
The electrician has a little more work to finish.
Then the bedroom can move forward.
And somewhere inside a floor-to-ceiling wardrobe, if the design works as I hope, there will be an ironing board that I only discovered existed yesterday.
I am strangely pleased about that.
Now we just need to decide where everything else goes.
Where relevant, factual and technical references were checked against the sources cited with this article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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