Off the Shelf

After transforming the smallest bedroom into my dressing room, and organizing all my clothes along that fab closet wall, the teeny tiny (barely 25" wide!) closet in my bedroom didn't really have a purpose...  I didn't need the narrow bit of hanging storage it provided, and not much would fit on the one little shelf up top.  Eventually, it became a black hole of random things...  the junk drawer of closets!  Fortunately, I forgot to take a 'before' pic until it was all cleared out...

clean slate - even the closet rod & shelf are gone

(Check out the boxed-in chimney taking up half the closet, as well as the awful 'pea soup' paint someone used here & in the entryway.  Who would ever choose this colour?!!)

Anyway, I'm always on a mission to maximize storage in such a small house, so I thought this closet would be more useful filled with shelves.  When 'the Boy' moved in, this project became even more important - I felt kinda bad that he had to keep his clothes in the little armoire out in the hall for months (ok, over a year...)

testing the fit of the new shelves...

After a couple coats of paint, the pea soup colour is gone, and the closet transformation is complete (and yes, I regret not painting the walls until after the shelf supports were in.  They made it pretty tedious!)

all done!

I love the look of a nice chunky shelf, so we added 2" faces to the front of the shelves.  They cover the mdf edge, and hide the shelf supports.

chunky shelves!

The best part is that this whole closet makeover was essentially free.  For the paint I used leftovers from previous projects (the taupe paint is the hallway colour, and the shelves were just leftover white semigloss), and all the mdf was left from an as-yet-unblogged studio project (stay tuned!). 

The shelves hold a surprising amount, too.  I'll spare you the current view of stacks of black work pants & an extensive collection of Bike Week t-shirts, but all of the Boy's clothes are in there now!  There was even space to sneak some of mine in (but just my painting clothes & some pjs, I didn't want to get greedy!)
:)