Taming the Monster in the Closet: I

A project in which the closet itself becomes a monster.

I tell ya', full-on occupying these spaces for almost 6 years means that these rooms and their closets are full-on filled up which is adding complexity to this flooring project in that it takes not a small amount of time to move stuff around repeatedly.

When the room is too narrow to get frame the photo well so you rotate it in Photoshop and then realize that the shelf was level before you rotated so you leave the background weirdness to add to the overall non-fun house effect.

It also means that I am taking this as an opportunity to attack these closets by adding some shelves and getting a fresh coat of paint in there. I had a gallon of paint that was a bad choice for the guest room's neutral, but a fine choice for inside a couple of closets.

What are those cutouts for? Only the left-most is over a stud.

On both ends the closet has room for shelves; on one end they're deeper than is practical for storing clothes, but the only clothes we store in here are costumes and they are hung on hangers. So that means that we need some hanging space for costumes and I want to have some for guests should they want to hang any of their clothes. On the other end where the shelves are shallower, we have an access door to the shower plumbing, so the shelves work around that and will store something easy to unload.

Of course, the doors and base moulding will be reinstalled, but after the new floor goes in.

What follows is the long path, riddled with obstacles, that lead to this unremarkable closet:

I reused what I could from the closet as it was when we moved it; parts of the closet rod and shelf, as well as the drywall-textured and painted-over rod/shelf brackets. The condition of the brackets really bothered me, but the idea of wasting them bothered me more. I decided to soak them in a Simple Green & water solution, scrap/rub off the paint and texture, then spray paint them to protect them from rusting, then reuse two of the three. I also drilled holes in the rod holder parts, so I could keep the rod stationary when sliding all the contents to one end.

I'm sure I'm not alone in that when I am remodeling and find something... er, unusual... I wonder about the history of the processes that went into the existing situation. I had always assumed that the knock-down/brocade drywall texture had been added sometime after 1976 when the house was built, but when I removed the base moulding, I saw that it covered all of the drywall. However, apparently they had installed the closet hardware before texturing the drywall. Curiouser & curiouser. And it seems that they had an issue with the plumbing in the shower at one point and cut through this drywall to deal with it.  Fair enough, but when they patched the wall that wasn't the access door, they didn't remove the shelf that was on top of these brackets. Funny thing is: the shelf was not attached to the brackets. Just resting on there. The whole thing is even more puzzling since they aren't installed level.

Black was not what I was imagining, but it is what I already had on hand that wasn't a just-plain-wrong color or a color that might be better saved for more visible projects.

I used scrap moulding from the front door project to make a support for the rod/shelf part in the center of the closet. Despite all the extra steps in getting the brackets cleaned up and adding these supports, the was the easiest and most direct part of this project.

Just to get every inch out of that closet rod, I put some stops on the ends. I used some funky cabinet knob escutcheons that came off the upstairs bathroom vanity. They're definitely weird and probably gauche, but I think they're funny and... they work! So at least this section of the closet is no-cost... except the screws. GEEZ!

The access door to the plumbing for the shower on the other side of that wall is oddly fancy with it's angled trim and it's not-just-a plywood-square door. It also has a way more secure latch than did any of the three screen doors when we moved in.

I used this as an opportunity to take a whole mess of stuff we've removed from the house or that was left here to Home ReSource in Missoula for donation. I was hoping to get materials for building the shelves there, too, but they had none of what I was looking for. It would have felt good to use something that might have otherwise ended up in the landfill and to nurture my inner cheapskate by not paying full price. At least I was able to keep 6 light fixtures, a ceiling fan, a stainless steel kitchen sink and faucet, 3 curtain rods, some curtains, a couple-few dozen switch and outlet covers, and various other bits of hardware and some paint/stain out of the landfill with our donation.

[I had intended to take a photo of the stuff all loaded up, but forgot. It would've gone here] 

I decided to at least use what I could from our scrap wood stash to make the shelf cleats. Most of this is what was left from building the wood shed. I tried to buy 3/4" plywood from the local lumber yards. Yard I doesn't have a way to rip a 4x8 sheet into two 2x8 pieces so I can actually haul it. Also, the "new" guy there is almost-subtly patronizing and a blatant mansplainer... he once actually mansplained to me how I should feel about the weather. So yeah. Yard II simply didn't have any 3/4" plywood. I didn't have the heart to further inquire about the smoothness of the 3/4" that usually carry and to ask again if they could cut it - the poor trainee seemed to be really struggling with the phone call already. Well, dammit! I tried to do good, but had to drive back into Missoula to a big box supplier.

Dumb mistake: I had the audacity to assume a wall that is longer wider than 16" would have a stud somewhere between the two ends. This is not the case for the shorter front walls of this closet. Of course, I didn't check until I had 3/4 of the cleats cut... from a 2x4 ripped into thirds. What a waste of time and materials! Maybe at least some of these very specifically cut lumber will be suitable for the studio/office/sewing room/auxiliary guest room close when I get to that?

Sigh. And so. Thinking about what we had already:
-Standards and brackets, but what sizes and in what quantity are out there? And were exactly are they out there? Not the right sizes. In the two places I thought they were.
-What is there that would not be best used in another place, sitting unused for even more time until then? All of it would be best used elsewhere, unfortunately.
-What about all those wooden brackets removed from the master bedroom way back when? Nope. Too small.

You can see that I haven't yet gotten the top shelf installed. That's because I'll need to get more 1/4" AC plywood, so next time I'm in Missoula and near Lowe's I'll get it. Then I'll already have materials for the next closet!

Anyway, that's the deal with the pine-board brackets; they're screwed to the corner studs and to the cleat on the back wall. The shelf is screwed to the brackets. I added a piece of screen moulding to the front for a tiny bit of added stability and to cover the plies.

Something similar will happen in the studio/office/sewing room/auxiliary guest room when I tackle the floors in there later this year, but hopefully it will go much more smoothly, quickly, and unembarrassingly.