I've had a vision that plagues me, every night when I go to bed and every morning when I wake up. A vision of a closet that's not full of stupidly wasted space. Instead, this is what I see:
It drove me nuts. UNTIL. I woke up last Saturday morning and decided this was the day. I'd been hatching a plan for better using the space in the closet, with its one dumb pole and skinny shelf that was making my leather bags droop.
As closets go, it's not that bad for its era (predating the master suite with walk-in, unfortunately for me and my herd of Coach, Minkoff and Rowley). It fits most of what we need to stuff into a closet, and I have an extra closet in my office that
is a walk-in for overflow and formal clothes we don't use very often. There's also a row of cabinets (pictured below), in which we store out-of-season clothes--basically an entire wall of storage. But still, I hate wasted space, so I assembled my team:
- Super Wonderbar
- Hammer
- Ear muffs
- Assorted painting supplies
- Drill
- Faux Dremel Multimax (from Harbor Freight)
And went to work on the closet. Demo was pretty simple...
Although removing the two-inch nails that secured the shelf support to the wall left a number of these. Love working on a house with plaster walls. I wasn't anticipating having to spackle a bunch of holes...
...before glooping on a couple coats of paint to cover the unpainted strip the shelf support was concealing. Oh well. I managed to get two coats of paint on thick enough that I didn't need to do more, using perhaps the worst painting technique I have ever executed. (For those late to the game,
this room took tinted primer plus four coats of blue for the mesmerizing cobalt you see here.) It involved a hack saw, a mini roller and the paint can. No tray. I'll let you wonder about that one.
Anyway. The weekend was a blur of touchup paint, rather unsuccessfully priming and painting the melamine panel that now divides the shelving from the poles (stupid primer said no sanding, but I should have known better than to believe it), LOTS of measuring repeatedly and an equal amount of leveling and adjusting.
Most of the materials used are from Lowe's, HD and
Builder's Bargain, the motto of which I have mentioned before: "B-grade building materials may not meet code." How could you not love a place with that kind of winning marketing? However, four pieces of material were from somewhere much more interesting. The shelves were, in a former life, our kitchen cabinet doors. They had a lot going for them in terms of shelving.
- already painted
- flat and not warped, and already acclimated to the house so shouldn't warp in the future
- kitchen to be demoed soon anyway
- removing doors makes things a lot easier to find in kitchen
- very sturdy (3/4"-thick plywood)
- FREE.
It took me most of the weekend on and off, but we now have a closet that makes maximum use of the space and features mostly level shelving and poles. (The top pole slopes down to the left.) There's even extra space for hanging bulky stuff like hoodies that we'd both wadded up and stuffed in our dressers.
Now I can enjoy my pre-sleep and coming-to moments in peace, instead of being jarred by an unthoughtfully designed closet.
Next in the crosshairs: that alcove above Todd's built-in dresser. The only thing I've done to it is removed the wallpaper, and it's looked really pretty crummy since I did that four and a half years ago. Also, curtains or doors or something. Probably curtains.
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