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Bedroom Update: Closet Part 1

And… the work on our bedroom continues :) You thought I forgot about it didn’t you? Well I haven’t, I’m just still working on it, sheesh! For this next project I had to wait for my husband’s help. It required the use of some power saws and he prefers to use them instead of me (he must think I’m going to lose a finger or something!).

We have a closet in our bedroom but it’s small and hard to use. We also have a built in desk that we used as additional closet space since we both have our own offices and didn’t need to use it as a desk (besides, who wants to sit at a desk where the door opens right in front of it?!). While we were using it as a closet it looked like this:

Huge eye-sore. We actually had some white curtains that covered it up but they weren’t tall enough to go all the way to the ceiling so they still looked bad. I snapped this picture right before we started to take it all apart. We have lived here for 4 years and it looked like this the whole time, well, on a clean day :) Basically, it made me cringe every time I walked into our room. That is how much I hated it! So what do we do but rip it out and start over!!

So far we have only finished half of it but I thought I would show it to you anyway. Here is a picture of our new, half-done closet space:

Jason ripped out the old desk, fixed the drywall and I painted the nook the same color as the rest of the room. Then, Jason built me a new high shelf and added a closet rod. The shelf stores our decorative bed pillows when we are not using them. Since it’s so high up I couldn’t reach it anyway so it made good use of the space instead of just throwing our pillows on the floor.

Jason knew I didn’t want curtains to hide the mess (because I hated them last time) and he was afraid that I wouldn’t like the exposed clothes hanging there. But I have seen a bunch of pictures of exposed closets floating around the internet and I wanted to give it a try. To help make it feel less messy, I decided to only hang black and white clothes or jeans on the rod. Because I stick to those basic colors, I don’t mind them showing. I would still like to buy all black hangers to replace the white so they blend it a bit better.

But wait, that’s not all! This is the tricky part of the closet:

The space is pretty deep and so it felt like wasted space to not use what was behind the hanging clothes. So, I asked Jason if he would build me a couple of angled shelves to put some shoes on. It doesn’t hold all of my shoes but a fair amount. I love it and it works good for me. I wasn’t sure if it would be a pain to access them since I would have to move my clothes out of the way but it’s actually not. Since I know where each pair of shoes is in relation to the shelf, I just pull apart the clothes at the right spot and I can easily find them. It’s kind of like opening a closet door. Plus, I don’t normally push aside the clothes as much as I did for this shot, I just separate them enough to get what I need.

For this project we reused the wood from the desk that used to be there and paint that I had on hand. The only thing we had to buy was the closet rod. Pretty good, huh?

Next up, we are going to build a few more shelves with dividers down below that will create more storage space and will cover up the carpet that’s missing. Once again, anything I put on the shelves I will sort by color so that it’s pleasing to the eye.

What do you think? Would it bother you to have your clothes showing? Or does the color coordinated approach help you get past it like it did me? I would love to hear your thoughts whether you agree or not :)