A mini closet makeover

Do you remember when my ceiling flooded and I had to tear out the sheetrock and replace it with new sheetrock?

Last month I ended my post with my sheetrock looking like this:

Unfortunately this is NOT a follow up tutorial for how to finish installing sheetrock (aka texturing it to look like the rest of the ceiling). Nope my friends, I STILL have not finished the patch job. It still looks like it did a month ago.

However, when I was patching the hole and ended up with the above result, the reson I never finished the job is because I got totally sidetracked on a different impromptu closet project…

I’ve been keeping this poor saw busy lately!

The reason I borrowed this saw from my dad was for this closet project, not the fence project like you might assume. Fortunately for my husband, I already had this saw on hand when I did the fence job which is the only reason the fence was fixed and not just knocked over. 🙂

Okay, so what on earth did I do???

The closet looked like this when we bought the house:

  
I put two pictures side-by-side to try to show the the whole closet.

I cleared all the clothes off the middle section and moved everything out of the way.

This middle section is coming out! It just makes the closet so claustrophobic and dark. I will lose a little hanging space, but do we really need that much anyway?

I made sure that if I removed it it wouldn’t mess up the carpet where it was attached to the floor. To my surprise and sheer excitement this section was installed after the carpet was installed. Basically the side piece of wood was just sitting on top of the carpet. I have the green light to proceed!

I probably should have moved everything out of the closet because of all the sawdust flyin’ but I figured the closet was already covered in insulation from the ceiling drama, so I just kinda shoved all the clothes out of the way…

Next thing I did was to measure where I needed to cut the top of the shelf.

Then I just took that little saw and cut on my line praying the entire time that this project actually works and I don’t ruin my closet.

T-iiiiiiii-mmmmmm-bb-eeeeee-rrrrrrrrrrrr!

Okay, so it really wasn’t that dramatic. I had to wedge it and force it over, but regardless, the center section fell over.

Here are the two pieces I’m left with now – the piece that made the side of the shelf and the piece that made the top of the shelf.

I removed one of the closet rod holder things from this leftover wood and attached it to the middle section on my wall that I just cut apart.

I installed this metal closet rod holder right on top of where the previous wood was attached for the section I removed.

Now it looks like this:

I just need to cut one of the leftover clothes rods to fit in the empty space along the back of the closet.

Perfect!

The lower levels of clothes rods on either side of the closet didn’t have any shelves on them. They were just open bars, so I couldn’t set anything on top of them to use as a shelf.

I took my leftover wood and cut it down the middle to form two pieces.

Once they were cut I just set them on top of the clothes bars to create a shelf.

This shelf needed to be cut at an angle which was really fun trying to figure out the angle to cut it.

You can tell I made these shelves out of the leftover shelving because there are sections that aren’t painted. Also, I need to add a layer of caulk around the back edge of each shelf between the wall and the shelf.

Here’s the closet almost finished.

Here’s another angle of the new shelf above the lower level clothes rod. You can tell I reused the wood.

I ran out of wood so the shelves don’t go from end to end…

But honestly, I like having them not finihsed because it created a little space to store less-used items of clothing like suits.

And the finished result:

Before I got crazy and ripped out an entire shelf in my closet:

AFTER I finished:

I still need to caulk and paint, but overall I’m LOVING the new space.

By removing some shelves and taking away some storage space, I created a more open bright space that has room for dressing in the middle.