Picardy Project

building shit & raising girls

Starting to Finish a Really Awkward Closet

My art room/office has this really awkward closet in it

The size of this closet is especially ridiculous: it’s 19″ deep and 92″ wide. Yes, totally insane. And not very user friendly. Originally part of it belonged to the bedroom. We know this because of the pattern and absent framing on the floor

The grand plan would have been to take back this space from the closet and put it back in the bedroom. But well, we just didn’t want to do it. So instead I’ve got to get my organizing brain wrapped around how the hell we’re going to get this space as usable as possible. For the time being it’ll just be where we store Cashew’s extra things (clothes that she doesn’t fit in yet, diapers, wipes, bathtub when not in use, etc.) but eventually it’ll be nice to make this a fully functioning closet. Well, as functioning as a crazy skinny room will allow.

And in order to get there we needed to fix the floors, do some rewiring and drywall the space.

First up Chris popped up that stupid framing left on the floor and patched

The flooring is pretty ridiculous in here, so we weren’t very careful about “matching” anything. Eventually we’ll need to sand down the part the flooring guys didn’t refinish (idiots), but for the time being just getting the floor patched was good enough.

There were also a bunch of pieces of wood that were sticking out in strange places so Chris used the reciprocating saw to cut everything flush so that drywalling would be a lot easier. It took about 2 hours to patch and clean things up, but then we were ready to drywall the space. Chris started working on the ceiling first

And soon realized that before he could work on the walls it would be best to address some of the wiring in here. There’s an outlet in our bedroom corner that’s halfway up the wall (for power, phone and cable) that we aren’t too fond of, so Chris took it out. We have our TV currently plugged into it, but there’s also an outlet much closer to the ground that’s usable, so we opted to remove the floating outlet

In addition, it’s been on our to do list to install an outlet in the hallway, so we figured it would be easier to do that now while the wall is open

After that it was time for hanging more drywall

This little, skinny closet took 6 sheets of drywall to finish, but it looks a lot better than before

Now it’s time for mud and tape and a complete mind fuck of how to actually make this a “usable” closet space.

Comments

  1. I recently bought a Rev a Shelf unit off Craigslist. A guy took it out of an almost new kitchen reno and I'm using it in my bathroom. It has metal baskets that are adjustable. My opening was long and narrow.

  2. I'd build some deep floor-to-ceiling shelving and find a container that is just large enough to maneuver out of the space. Double/triple stack them (end to end) and use a hook to pull them out as needed.

  6. What do you want to store in there? If clothing, what about a rolling rack that you can pull out to look at clothes and then roll it back in? Maybe even with some shelving at hte back (so you can roll the clothes out and walk in to get at the shelving).

    If you want to store "stuff", I still think a rolling system might be best (like the one a previous commenter mentioned).

  7. For now we'll just store Cashew's misc. items, but eventually I'd like for it to be a functioning bedroom closet. We don't use the room as a bedroom now (it's my office), but that's the room's real purpose so I'd like to make sure it's functional for clothing storage.