Linen Closet For The Win!

My quick linen-closet makeover is pretty much done and I'm so happy.  Though it's a much larger space, it took half the time that the entry closet did.  Fortunately. 

Here are a few "before" photos to remind you what exactly we were workin' with:

Check out the holes in the walls in between the weird wooden slats of that weird wooden slat-thing on the left.  And please admire all the crap jammed in there too.

The bare light bulb really shows off the awesome condition of the walls in here, right?

I have nothing to say for myself.

So, as I mentioned in the last post, I'd planned to 1) repair, prime, and paint the walls and trim (you can't see the trim in any of these photos, but like all the other closets in the house, the back of the door and the door molding were painted a gross barf color); 2) install 5 stained wooden shelves with shelf paper; 3) find a small dresser with a few drawers to hold miscellaneous crap; 4) re-home linens into the closet and find other homes for stuff that doesn't belong in a linen closet; and 5) replace the bare bulb with a sconce.

I didn't accomplish anywhere near all of that, but as it happens, I didn't need to.

Here's a shot I took last night of the fresh, clean linen closet (don't mind the glaring light please):

So here's what I DID do:

1) First I demo'ed the old gross shelves and the strange wooden rack-type-thing.  Then I spent a full day filling holes in the walls and huge cracks in the corners. 

Then I primed (two coats--these walls were really thirsty and covered with epic stains), then painted the walls with Behr's Reflecting Pool.  It looks a little purpley in this shot, but it's actually a really pale blue-gray.  My camera is crap.

2) Instead of going with wooden shelves, which would have looked beautiful and been cheaper, we opted for these wire ones.  We chose them for a bunch of reasons: first, they're lightweight; second, they'll permit airflow (very important when you live in the perpetually damp Pacific Northwest);  third, they're adjustable; and fourth, they're really really ridiculously easy to install.  We just bought two 60" tracks and two eight-foot lengths of shelf, which we cut to size with our handy-dandy hacksaws (we have two, I don't know why).  

3) I haven't found the little dresser yet-- I looked all over the used furniture and antique joints in town, but I couldn't find anything worthy of my fresh clean new closet.  Still looking.

4) The linens are in the closet and I love it.  Also, a bunch of stuff has found new lodging in the tool closet or the master closet or the built-in in the bathroom.

5  Now that the walls are freshly painted and the back of the door isn't puke-colored, the bare lightbulb doesn't bother me.  Maybe I'll change it out someday when we're done with everything else.  In the meantime, please enjoy this side-by-side comparison of my closet before and after:

I still need to hang my gift-wrap organizer and my cleaning-supplies organizer and my broom-and-mop hanger (those'll go in the nook where the slat-things were) and I'll be on the lookout for the small dresser to hold my picture-hanging supplies, etc. 

But for now, yeah-- I'm happy.

Close[t], But No Cigar

When we first looked at our house, I was majorly impressed with the closets. For a 40's house, it has an epic amount of closet space-- the entry closet, a huge master closet, the halfway-decent one in the second bedroom, giant built-in bathroom cabinet, and three oddly-shaped closets in the laundry room. But the prize for Best Closet Of All goes to the one in the hallway-- it's L-shaped, maybe four feet deep by five feet wide in front (where the "L" is) and three feet wide in back. It's the most awesome linen closet ever!

Except at the moment we can't store any linens in it because it's way too funky in there. The shelves are oddly placed and made of old unfinished plywood, the walls have never been primed or painted and are full of holes, it's lit by a bare bulb sticking straight out of the wall. And before I show you photos of what's going on in there right now, please promise not to judge me-- since we can't use any of the kitchen cabinets for reasons that will become abundantly clear to you when I get around to a kitchen-related post, and we can't use the attic for storage (obviously), basically everything we own EXCEPT our linens is stuffed into this closet:

See all the holes in the walls?  See all the crap stuffed in here?  Ugh.

I do love the IKEA doormat on the floor in there-- it's herringbone-patterned jute.  In fact, it's pretty much the only thing in here that's staying.

So the closet currently holds: the vacuum cleaner, our dirty-clothes basket, an old hamper full of craft supplies, my sewing stuff, a bunch of old pillow covers and shower curtains, our spare paper towels, a huge rug pad, a plastic two-drawer thing full of lightbulbs and picture-hanging accoutrements, our mop and buckets, my gift-wrapping things, everything but the kitchen sink and  our linens.  They're in the master closet taking up valuable real-estate.

The plan of attack (after the entry closet debacle, I'm aware this is probably going to take a million years to accomplish):

1. Repair, prime, and paint walls and trim. In keeping with the blue-closet trend (it's totally a trend because I did it and so did my friend Courtney), I think I'll paint it with the leftover pale blue-gray from the guest bedroom.

2. Reposition shelf brackets, replace shelves with nice dark-stained wooden ones.

3. Line shelves with pretty, non-sticky shelf paper.

4. Replace the plastic two-drawer thing with a nice 3-4 drawer wooden piece that will hold a bunch of the crap that's just floating around in there right now. There's a furniture-share in my town I've been dying to check out...

5. Buy wall caddy for broom and mop. Relocate mop buckets to tool closet in laundry room.

6. Organize gift wrap on the wall by doing something like this.

7. Replace light fixture with sconce with on-off switch rather than pull-cord (possibly like my cute cheap bathroom one?).

8. Organize linens in new functional linen closet, and

9. Move dirty-clothes hamper to master bedroom closet floor.

All-in-all, this should be a cheap makeover that makes our house easier to live in, and hopefully it will impress prospective buyers when we're ready to sell. Baby steps.