Wrapping up the to-do list in the guest/toddler room

Beginning with the closet…

In just a few hours, we’ll be 8 days from our due date. Also known as exactly how early our first daughter arrived two and a half years ago. So with that in mind, I figured I should probably clear the decks of any recent projects in the backlog before I look up and the baby is six months old and I haven’t done anything in the house or blogged about it since November 2014.

As I described in the post about the Murphy bed, we’re turning the former guest room into our daughter’s room, combined with the ability to keep it as a guest room when needed. But mostly, we’re moving her stuff into the room, which means finding new places for all the stuff we had stashed in there previously and reorganizing all the clothes and what not.

After re-doing my closet a couple years ago, it had always bugged me that I hadn’t done a thing in this closet since we moved in. When I re-did the room, I literally just patched the plaster and repainted the inside of the closet. And then reinstalled the single clothes rod with shelf above it right back where it was.

One rod, about face high, with a shelf above it. That was it, though there’s tons of space inside this closet. Despite how it looks in this magical photo from 2011, this thing was a mess a few weeks ago. Crap piled up in the bottom that we hadn’t been able to organize, and a terrible use of space, especially for a kids’ closet that needs lots of shelves and options for smaller clothes.

So a few weekends ago, I ripped out the old shelving and drafted a plan for all new shelving. (Can’t find the notepad with the picture on it, though. Nuts.)

To save time (and paint), I used the leftover paint from the bedroom walls/ceiling to paint all the shelves and the walls — no white on trim in the closet anywhere. After spending so much time decoratively routing edges of shelf supports and priming and painting things in my closet that I’ve never seen again since I finished it, I said ‘no more’ and swore that this one would be as simple as possible.

I had almost enough wood leftover from the Murphy bed to cut all the shelving. I used the jigsaw to cut the corners in rounded patterns — inward for the bigger “L” shelves, and outward for the smaller outside corners. Ended up actually looking pretty good in the end. With an all new configuration to make the most of the space.

With about 9 foot ceilings upstairs, but closets that are around 6.5 feet tall, there’s a lot of space up above that top shelf. So I added a second shelf up higher on the right side. And that’s where I’ve stashed a bunch of shoeboxes of photographs and other things that we don’t want to store in the attic because of the wild temperature changes.

The round dowel looks like it runs all the way through the shelves, but it’s actually three separate pieces. Those shelves needed a support at that corner, but I wanted something that looked a little more elegant than a rectangular 1-by or whatever. (I did the same thing in the laundry room.) And I rounded those corners to make it easier to take clothes off and on of the second rod that runs front to back there — for now where we store our jackets; Lily’s clothes are on the bottom rod. (Yes, there’s a low rod down there under the lowest shelf at left.)

We decided to take the door off the hinges. the room is a pretty dumb design. Even though there’s that space to play with inside the right side of the closet, the house was designed with the closet opening all the way to the left, which means you can’t open it if the bedroom door is all the way open. It drove Rachel crazy, so I took the door off. Probably need to fill those hinge mortises with epoxy at some point.

Taking the door off worked well — we actually did the same thing in the nursery. So when we wrapped up, we moved Lily’s curtain from the closet in the nursery over to this room.

A few more things to cover, coming up soon.