Hi everyone,
It's been awhile, huh?
I've been hard at work with a few projects. We got one zone air conditioning from Ductless America for our downstairs combined living room/dining room. Its been really nice and the unit is pretty unobtrusive above a doorway as they recommended. We changed the layout down there so that the cat litter boxes are in front of the windows. The cats seem to really love sitting in front of the windows, particularly when we pull the curtains back. They try to pull the curtains back themselves as well, which doesn't work well with claws. Oh well.
We've been using the front bedroom of the house as the master. It has a little alcove that fits our dresser perfectly. The previous owners used the back bedroom as their master, though, and upgraded the closet in there to match.
Pinterest helped out with ideas on how to design and organize our closet to meet our needs. "Just a girl and her blog" and "View Along the Way" had some great ideas that got us started.
I took inventory and realized that we needed shelving for folded clothing, additional storage for bags and other gear, more hanging room, and shoe shelving. We don't really need hanging for long items, as I don't really wear dresses very often, so they could stay in the guest room closet.
We went to home depot and got various sizes white wire shelving to match the shelving in the rest of the house, for under $100. The boyfriend and I considered upgrading to nicer cabinetry, but since that meant upgrading all of the closets in the entire house, we decided against it. We did have to modify the sizes of some of the shelves, which was easy using a saw. We also got caps for the shelving to finish off the sawed off edges - we had to go back for more supports and caps.
First we moved up the existing wide shelf to the top of the closet. We put it just high enough that we can still reach it, but that little used storage (bags, etc) can go up there for now.
We then added 4 side shelves to both of our sides of the closet for more folded items. I think the boyfriend is just stashing dirty clothes there when he comes in late at night and doesn't want to wake me by putting them away. Yeah, right.
It took us a few hours to get everything done. We had about 4 screws to go when our neighbors kindly asked us to stop at 8:30 pm on a Sunday because their 6 month old infant had gone to sleep. The boyfriend finished up without me the next day, putting in the final side shelf and shoe shelf. I then fancied it up by switching out the old plastic and metal hangers for all wooden hangers. I had several previous sets of wooden hangers from Bed Bath and Beyond and got a few more from Amazon to get the boyfriend's stuff up to snuff. He does not understand or appreciate the uniformity and class that the wooden hangers bring to our closet. He does understand that it brings me joy every day to open the closet and start off my day with order instead of chaos.
Voila!