Bedroom Closet Before/After

Total Cost:

$0 - Everything we already had... paint, hooks, shelves, hangers, boxes... I like this kind of project :)

Bedroom Closet

Our Master Bedroom has two closets, which is two more than most houses the age of ours. One is original, one was added probably in the 50's. The original one is located between the chimney and stairs and is about 7' deep and 30" wide. Before we even moved in, I told R this would be his closet. The other closet is a more "normal" size, about 30" deep and 6' wide. I hang most of my clothes up, plus need a lot of storage, so that closet became mine. I painted/cleaned my closet in October of last year, because I couldn't stand living out of boxes (I'm one of those people who need to see all their clothes in order to choose one). R, however, was perfectly content with his clothes in boxes. Because he didn't care, cleaning and painting his closet kept moving farther and farther down on my list of things to-do. In July I had finally had enough. We were about to go on vacation and I hate leaving the house messy when we're away (it's one of those things my mom ingrained in my head when I was little... you never want to go away and come home to a messy house). I had finally had enough of the boxes of clothes piled up in our bedroom.

It ended up not being as bad as I originally though. Only 1 dead spider and no huge cracks in the walls that needed repairing. All in all, I finished in two days (and I didn't spend all day working.. basically just the afternoons). The first day I spent cleaning out everything we had accumulated in there (boxes, suitcases, misc. stuff we weren't using and didn't have another place for), patching holes in the walls, and painting some of the trim. The second day I painted the door, ceiling, shelves and walls.

Luckily it was a very dry day, so the paint dried incredibly fast and I was even able to organize all of R's stuff in the closet before he came home!

The closet has 2 shelves in the back (about 24" deep). One these I put some long-term storage, pillows, and some of Ryan's stuff that he rarely uses. Underneath the bottom shelf (which is about 3' off the floor) I put our large suitcase and filled it with all of our dufflebags, backpacks, etc., so now when we're packing to go somewhere everything is in one place. On top of that I put our big, thick winter comforter in it's bag. (That's another thing I'm very excited to have a place for... It's white and light blue, and when it's too hot we've just been kicking it onto the floor. It basically spent the whole summer on the floor which means it got dirty from the floor and from the dog that decided that it was a new big huge bed we bought for her). Along the walls are old hooks which I was originally going to replace, but then decided just to paint them. I hung R's belts and ties on them.

Because the closet is so incredibly deep, there are 2 hanging rods. This would not have worked for me because I need to see all of my clothes. For R though, perfection! On the back rod I hung all of his winter clothes and on the front rod, all of his summer clothes! So now when he's looking for something, they're organized so he's not looking through sweatshirts for a polo shirt, but also if we have a cold early fall day, he still has the option to grab a long sleeved shirt if he wants. It also means that season-changing will be easier because rather than spending a whole day unpacking and packing clothes (like I do for my clothes), all I have to do is switch which rod they're hanging on.

The floor in front is open for laundry baskets and other misc. items like our large bed pillows if we're not using them. And yes, every single item from that first picture (in the closet and surrounding it) is all in here... I fit it all :-D

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware Installed

Today's biggest goal was to install the Kitchen cabinet hardware. While on a job site last week, I was talking to one of the cabinet installers and he gave me a tip on installing cabinet hardware. He always puts a piece of painter's tape on the cabinet, then measures center/hole lines on that, and drills right through the tape. That way you're not marking up the cabinet, and it's easy to change your mind (for example, for the larger drawers, I first measured for the pulls to be located dead center on the drawer, then we decided they looked better toward the top, so it was easy to change, and we didn't have to worry about cleaning up the old markings). We installed all of the pulls on the top drawers exactly centered, both vertically and horizontally. For the two larger drawers, we located the pulls centered horizontally, and the same distance from the top as the upper drawers. We not only liked the look better, but it'll be more functional.

And here are the same drawers with the new pulls. We also added two pulls to the fake panel in front of the sink. While installing them, R discovered that the panel pops off... which made me excited because that'll make it really easy to turn that useless panel into a handy flip-down drawer for sponges, etc.

I also decided to work on our bedroom door. The whole back hallway will be redone this year... new drywall, ceilings, etc., which will get done at the same time as the stairs and pantry. But I figured that for the time being I could get started on some of the dirty work... such as scraping the paint off of the doors. For Christmas I got a fancy paint scraper... It is good for scraping paint off of anything.. including paint rollers (the curved part of the scraper).

It did a great job! I had tried putty knives, spray paint removers, and a couple other types of scrapers with little lucky. Within an hour I had the door going from to this 

It may not seem like much, but it made a huge difference! I also scraped a bunch of paint off of this door's casing. I figure if I can get the doors in this hall (there are 2 of them) scraped now, then by the time it's warm out (will that ever happen? It's -2 degrees out right now..) I'll be able to take them outside to sand and paint.

Getting back to work..

Due to Christmas, we haven't been getting much work done in the house lately. Which is a little disappointing. But we're too busy, and family comes first.

Thanks to a beautiful blizzard (our first in the house) this weekend, and Christmas being over, we did get some work done, finally! Today I did some more unpacking in the Kitchen and Living Room, and Ryan installed the new knobs on our bedroom built in cabinetry. We also decided to re-use the existing cabinet "locks" (basically just a small piece of hardware that flips over to keep the cabinet doors shut). We were both a little concerned about the doors (especially the ones in front of the fireplace) opening. So we decided that we'd just spray paint them to match the new knobs. That was when we discovered this on the back:

February 27, 1843

While unpacking more Kitchen stuff (I seriously think I own every single Kitchen item ever made!), I also cleaned up a bit. Because we've been so busy, I never really cleaned the countertops up after R was working on the beadboard 2 weeks ago. So I cleaned up all of the dust and tools he left behind, and unpacked some of my countertop items (spice rack, knives, utensil holder, etc). It actually looks like a real Kitchen now! Who knew that all it took was a spice rack!

Painting the Master Bedroom

Originally we weren't going to paint the Master Bedroom right away. There are so many other things that need to get done in the house that seemed to take priority over it. The room was pretty clean, and appeared to have been painted in at least the last 30 years (whereas there are some rooms in the house that haven't been touched in over 60 years). And I didn't hate the paint color. It was a greenish-brownish color, which doesn't match our black furniture and blue comforter and pillows, but hey, priorities. 

A fresh coat of paint never hurt anyone. Since there aren't any other repairs or any other work that needs to get done in the room, Ryan suggested freshening up the room with one coat of paint, just to give it that finished look. So this afternoon my dad and I painted the walls. We really should have gone and gotten white paint for the ceiling and trim first, but it was one of those "let's do it now" moments and we just got right to work and regretted it after. The white trim in the above pictures didn't look so white when we were done. We painted the walls blue, the only reason being that we had free paint. When we painted our apartment when we moved in we used an online paint calculator that was way way off. So we bought 2 gallons of paint and only used half of one. It didn't photograph well though.. it looks really bright and obnoxious in these pictures. I swear it really isn't!

So now all we have left is to paint the ceiling and trim, paint the PINK radiator, repair some holes/cracks in the closets and clean the floor. And we have a bedroom ready to move into!