Closet Shelving + A Makeover

The closet in our home office/guest room has always been a source of discontentment for me.  It's ultra long and narrow but only has a one door opening.  I don't mind the one door opening part and actually, I prefer it vs. double doors or bifold doors because it allows more wall space in the room it's attached to but it does make things a little more difficult storage-wise.  With a one door opening, it's a little harder to get back to the side recesses of the closet.  This room doesn't serve as anyone's bedroom (yet) so there aren't any clothes that need to be hung in the closet but if there were, we'd have to rethink it once again (probably going the route we did in this closet).  Currently, it's home to home decor we aren't using, craft supplies, gift wrapping supplies, pillows, and a few other random things.  Built as your typical closet with a long rod for hangers with a shelf atop it, it didn't allow me many options to store these things.  

When we moved in, we didn't have a place to put the co-sleeper we made years ago (tutorial here) so I thought it might be nice to have it in here to give us some shelving.  It fit so why not?  But, we soon learned that, because of how it was built, it didn't allow easy access to what we stored on it.  To get anything off the big shelves, I had to wheel it out (I stuck some casters on it before we put it inside this closet) and then wheel it back in...which also meant I had to move everything in it's way out first before wheeling.  If that sounds like pain in the booty it's because it was.  👎

Over time, things just got more and more disorganized in there because I didn't like to wheel out the co-sleeper shelves so I just started stacking things on top, shutting the door quick, and pretending it wasn't going all awry in there.

Yipe.

Out of sight, out of mind, right?

But then I rolled the dice and the home office became the Let's Room Together space for three weeks and I knew we had no choice but to open up the doors and tackle this closet.

It took us all three weeks working on it in our free time (which isn't abundant) but it looks and makes me feel 394857 times better.

Everything now has a place that's accessible and it's all nice and good.

It's also nice and good to want to reorganize a closet to begin with but before I could even start with the organizing, I had to pull every last thing out and paint this thing.  Yes, I could've skipped the painting part but this closet was last painted in the 1980's (not a fact but if I had to guess...) and that dingy paint wasn't going to make any organizing look better.

After the trim was painted along with the walls and top shelf (Pure White by SW color-matched to Valspar), I had to continue on my mission to make our closets more exciting so I installed this wallpaper* to the back wall.  I found two rolls at Dirt Cheap for $3 each and one more on Amazon Warehouse bringing my total spent on wallpaper for this heckofa long closet to $30.

After the wallpaper was up, Anthony started building shelves.  The co-sleeper had to go (I actually ended up selling it...it was so hard because it's such a sentimental thing but we really had no place for it) and we decided open shelving would allow the best mode of organization. 

To maximize how much we could store on them, we made them almost as deep as the closet recess.  Anthony cut the actual shelves out of mdf and cut the shelf supports out of 1 x 2 furring strips.  He cut the shelves .25" shorter than the width of the closet recess so they didn't fit too tight and would slip right onto the supports. The side supports were cut 5" shorter than the depth of the shelf so that they didn't sit flush with the front of the shelf and, therefore, were slightly hidden and the back support was cut to the length of that back wall (the wall that the backs of the shelves touched.)  He used long wood screws to screw each support into studs in the wall.  Here's a visual to better explain:   

I painted everything white (same color as the walls) before it all went in.  Here's what the shelves look like underneath, post-installation:

It's a far cry from what it was before - it's actually organized and easy to keep organized. 

 

This is what I keep on this side of the closet:

The opposite side isn't quite as glamorous but it's got a couple of cube organizers - they were in the closet pre-makeover but set along the back wall.  I spun them to back up to this side wall and inside I've got those bright lime green storage boxes and yes, they're kind of taking away from the beauty of the new wallpaper but they were $1 each at Dollar Tree and it feels needless to go buy new ones just to change the color.  We'll see how long I can stand them.  ;)

They hold our hot glue gun, invitations and blank note cards, yarn, sewing trim and tassels, elastics, and a few office supplies.

So, three weeks to a prettier closet.  Huzzah!  I was a little disappointed that I didn't get more done in this room in those three weeks though (there's trim to be painted, pillow covers to be made, an accent wall that'd be fun to put up, etc...) but really, just having an organized closet has lifted a weight off my shoulders big time AND there will be plenty of time later to get back to this room.

I'll be back with one more post on our guest room/office, in particular, the guest room aspect of it.  We tweaked a few things before guests came last week so I got some good pictures of it serving as both and can't wait to show you!  It's working so well!

Happy Humpday!

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Psst, want to see our other fun closets?  Here is the kids' room closet, the entry closet, and the pantry.

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*These links are affiliate links which means that, if you click over and/or make a purchase through the link, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.  I am an Amazon affiliate and also use other sources to link to products.  All of these links will lead you to things we actually paid for or that are similar to the item we paid for in case ours is thrifted/sold out/secondhand.  This extra money helps us with the costs of running the blog and buying paint.  Thank you for your support and for fueling our love to share all things DIY!