New Closet

Yet another area of our house that had poorly planned out and poorly used storage, our walk-in closet off our bedroom. The closet had one shelf that wrapped around the entire closet at about 6 feet high which was great for having a bunch of long hanging space, but we needed a lot more shelf space than that. Cass had been saying she wanted to redo the closet since Christmas, and since I'm so fast about getting around to starting projects, we started the weekend before the 4th of July (half a year later)! The closet had the style of hanging where you had to put the hangers on backwards which Cass "loved" as you can see from her expression. The original plan was to clear out the closet, and have it painted by the end of Saturday and hang the shelves on Sunday! Yeah, we'll see about that.



I got the old shelves torn out on Friday only to reveal some lovely gaping holes in the drywall! Greeaat. So I filled those on Friday which meant we had to wait until Saturday to paint. Then, on Saturday morning the joint compound I used to fill the holes hadn't dried yet, >.< D'OH! I must've put too much in the holes. I got out the hair dryer and dried them out and after some sanding, we got crackin' on painting the walls. We decided to use the same green color that we have on the walls in our bedroom that face north and south. (The east and west walls are a tan color. See May 26, 2009.)
The white paint behind the coat of paint we put on was of course gloss finish, so the first coat of paint looked terrible and we knew that we'd have to put another coat on, but our dilemma was how much more paint do we buy? Do we just get a quart or spring for the gallon which is twice the price? Will we have enough for the second coat? What if it needs a third coat? We decided to just get a quart and it turned out to be just enough! Score 1 for us! Cass liked it so much, I thought the closet would make a nice bedroom for her. We had to wait for 24 hours to let the paint cure before we hung anything on the walls. So we waited for about 18 hours and I got started putting up the first set of shelves. As I mentioned before, my plan was to finish the shelves on Sunday. The following picture on the left shows you how far I got on Sunday. Yeah, I fell a bit behind schedule! It wasn't particularly difficult to put the shelves up, it's just that I'd never done it before and I wasn't sure the best way to do it making sure the shelves were level. I figured out a system and got one finished and one more half way hung. I'm used to things taking longer than I expect, though. Happens all the time.

Monday after work I started hanging more shelves and got the long shelves on Cass's wall and my wall finished. With my "system" I started working faster, so it took me a quarter the time it took me on Sunday to do her two shelves and finish my wall. Cass and I host a small group on Tuesdays, so I didn't get to work on it the next evening. On Wednesday though, I got the two shelves with the hanging bars on the broad wall that faces the door. When we got that up, things really started to take shape and we were excited about finishing the closet. Thursday came along and I didn't have band practice at church, so I was determined to get the closet finished. I just had a few more small shelves to hang, so I knew it was doable. Probably the most difficult single task to do during this whole thing was cutting the shelves because I had to use a hack saw. I didn't have a power tool I could use :-(, and of course since I was hanging 5 small shelves, this involved the most cutting! Nevertheless, I got them all cut and hung.

Here's the finished product with our clothes finally in place with plenty of space to spare.


And the best part is all the shelves are like this...

LEVEL!!!