The Closet That Wasn't

She Says:

I have a confession to make.  Or maybe we've already mentioned it, I can't recall, and I'm not going to read through the whole blog to figure that out.  My confession is this: we are addicted to reno.  This renovation is only phase one.  Once we tear down this entire house to the studs and rebuild it, we have plans for an addition.  Gluttons for punishment, I know.  But we are having too much fun.

The reason I bring this up now is that there is a portion of the hallway that is currently unused and walled off, because eventually that will lead in to the fabled addition.  But I need storage space *now.*  So we decided to build a "temporary" closet out of the unused space, nothing fancy, and cheap.

Here's the hole we're starting with:

We bought a $50 door, built bracing for it, and installed.  We patched the drywall, but didn't float it because this will all come out later anyway; like I said, temporary.  I guess that was about $20 in drywall and materials.

HoneyDo installed some $49 track lights, and I painted the whole thing with some leftover Ultra White from the spare bath.

I laid the floor, continuing the hardwood from the rest of the house.

Then we installed a $120 wire closet system.  I added a small bookcase that we didn't have any other use for; it makes great extra shelving.

We mounted a $20 Ikea Grundtal towel rack on the opposite side, for scarves (I've warned you before about my scarf problem).

And here it is, fully loaded!

I now have space for things that didn't have a home, like rags, aprons, and the vacuum cleaner.  Plus, it really frees up a lot of space in the master closet: blankets, sheets, and coats of every size and shape were moved in and are feeling right at home!

I already owned the baskets and boxes (I think I've also mentioned my basket problem as well), so no cost there.  That brings us to a grand total of $259!  Not bad for an entire new room!

I have to admit, at least once a day, I just open the closet, look around and sigh happily.

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DIY - Scarf and Belt Rack

She Says:

I love scarfs.  It's an addiction.  I could never have too many (I have way too many).  They're so colorful and soft and silky.  It's one of my favorite things about the weather getting cooler... I call it scarf weather.

He Says:

I love belts.  They keep up my pants.

She Says:  

So I figured we needed something to hold our favorite things in our new closet.  I had a couple of leftover pieces from the closet organizer kit (isn't there always?) that I repurposed for a scarf rack!

This was a part of the wall mounting system we didn't need to use.  Basically, it's just a piece of wood which matches the rest of the closet pieces.

I drilled holes spaced evenly across the board.  The piece already had holes drilled on each end, but they were too big, so I added a couple of washers so the screw wouldn't slip through.

Then I stole a few of the knobs we've already bought for the kitchen cabinets and screwed them into place:

We drilled small holes at an angle along the bottom of the wood, then drove finish nails through them and into the wall.

No mounting hardware needed!

Here it is, hard at work, holding some of my beloved scarves:

And here it is, submitting to a Cat Scan:

He Says:

And my belt rack?

She Says:

Yup.  That's done, too.

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Repurposed Ideas Weekly

Organize! Master Closet

She Says:

Now that I have a proper laundry, I need a place to put all those clean clothes!  We turned to the master closet space, which was woefully inadequate:

View to the left:

View to the right:

Aaaand that's the tour!  It's only 5 feet by 9 feet, so organization will be the name of the game for this room.  We also have plans to expand this room into the master bath footprint, but that will have to come later.  I need a closet NOW!

We wanted something a little prettier than wire racks for this closet.  We settled on the Allen & Roth system from Lowe's:

We chose several pieces from this system, all in cappuccino.  I like the semi customizable pieces, including shoe storage, drawers and baskets.

There wasn't just a whole lot of prep work for this room.  We tore out the old carpet, took down the wire shelving, and were pretty much ready for paint.  I chose Mercer Blue from the Valspar Eddie Bauer collection:

I picked this color from all the paint chips at the Valspar counter and fell in love with it.  Only later did I find out that apparently the rest of the world is in love with it too... for example, searching "Mercer Blue" on Houzz.com gives you over 36,000 results!  Ah well, if I can't be original, at least I can have good taste...

Because this closet is long and narrow, we chose some track lighting to fill the space.  

The positive is that it lights the closet well.  The negative is that they make for difficult photography in such a small space!

Next, the installation of the closet system.  It's pretty fool proof, we just followed the overly complicated directions and got it done.  It's also easy to customize this system with add on pieces to fit your particular space.

Again with the awkward camera angles: normally I would be all geeked out about the lens flare, but it's just annoying in these shots, so I apologize...

One thing about HoneyDo: he continues to surprise me!  As you can probably tell from here and here that I love baskets, but I assumed he would think that was too girly a thing to have an opinion about.  But when we were picking out the pieces for the closet, he said the baskets were cool and he wanted a bunch of them in the closet!  Woohoo!  No problemo, babe!  I think maybe he just wants to hide all my junk, but that's okay by me.  I'll take baskets any way I can get them...

Because we're running the hardwood throughout the house, we'll wait on this floor until the master is done, then do it all at once.