Let's talk closets. I love closets because a good organized closet sets you up for a clean house. I know it sounds dumb but having a place for everything that is easy and convenient to put away just makes it easier. I wish it helped with the act of doing laundry but at least I have a spot to put laundry now!
We are going to be redoing every closet in this house eventually. This is because we have created six new closets. Plus all of the old closets were a simple tension rod and shelf. Now there is nothing wrong with that style of closet, and we will be using that style in some of the closets, but others like our child's bedroom and our master bedroom needed more storage.
Let's start with the closet in our child's nursery. The closet was originally painted blue, so I painted it white. Originally I planned on just adding more shelves, but when we were at IKEA (getting our master closet system) we saw the Aurdal system. I told Darren I wanted to recreate that type of functionality, he probably exhausted by my ideas suggested we buy the pre built system and install it. So we did! It was relatively easy to put together. It's not as sturdy as if Darren would have built it himself but for the sake of time it was worth it. However after installing the IKEA closet we noticed some drywall that needed to be fixed and repainted due to the old shelf. Initially I decided I would put up peel and stick wallpaper. I bought this cute plaid print and set out determined. It was awful lining up the pattern and getting the bubbles out. Plus it just wasn't sticking to my wall. Frustrated I set out to Home Depot to buy either drywall repair kits or a bead board backing. Instead I found some peel and stick flooring on sale. It would kind of look like faux shiplap and one box of this flooring would cover the entire back wall. This idea ended up working really well! It was easy to install the tile. The tiles were heavy so Darren had me nail the four corners of each tile, but I didn't mind because I got to use his nail gun. I love how it looks and I have so much more storage and organization in this room now.
The next few I want to talk about are all brand new closets. Well a pantry and two utility closets. I've discussed our pantry before. It used to be an old shower and now it's a pantry. We used shelves from Menards to build it, as well as storage boxes from Target. It's not anything really fancy.
I used the same concept for two closets we added upstairs. We have upstairs laundry now (I'll blog all about that later) but in that laundry room I added a closet. We kept it simple with just shelves, but I made sure they were big enough shelves to hold laundry baskets. The other utility closet is actually in our bedroom. Right now it serves as a closet where I store extra medicine and toiletries that I do not want our child to get into. It will eventually be where I store additional towels for our master bathroom when we finish that project. I love having the utility closet in our bedroom though, because I never had a great place to store extra sheets or deodorant in our bedroom.
Finally my master closet is finished!!! Well apart from some cute storage boxes I want to buy, but those aren't a priority right now. The closet in our master was originally not a walk in. The closet also wrapped around two walls and covered windows. We tore that down and were planning on putting a walk in closet in that corner, but with the rather unique layout of our master we scrapped that plan for a new one.
Originally to enter our master you had to walk through a very choppy bathroom. We decided to do upstairs laundry and condense the bathroom. We also wanted to enclose the bathroom in a room instead of how it was originally open to the bedroom.
We drew out many many many plans and ultimately settled on one where we had to enter our master through the old closet. This meant we had to build a closet in a different corner of our bedroom. We also didn't want the closet to block our views of the lake, so we chose a corner opposite of our bathroom. It's not the ideal layout but it allows us to have lake views from our bed, still keeps all the plumbing on one side of the house, and allows us an actual private bathroom.
So we built the closet in the northeast corner of our room.
We included two windows that face our neighbors house in the closet which allows for natural light but doesn't ruin our views. We went with the IKEA pax system for our master closet. We had this system at our old house and it worked well. I love that this system is easy to assemble and relatively cheap. For us to build a similar system from scratch it would have been double the cost. If we bought the prebuilt systems at Menards or Home Depot or Lowe's it would have been triple! So PAX was the way to go. I will say I prefer the look of the darker system however when we used that in our old house it showed so much dust. I decided I wanted to go with the tan color simply because I'm not a fan of the white color. When we went to the store however not all of the drawers were available in tan. I decided to mix the tan with the grey color and I LOVE how it looks.
I think it makes it more unique and custom. One hurdle we did have with the closet system is one of the walls is angled. We could have cut the PAX system to fit this, but instead Darren got fancy and created shelves. I like having the shelves to store my workout clothes and things that just don't need to be hung. These shelves though match the angle of the wall which allows us to have as much storage as possible while working with the odd wall.
For the PAX units themselves we really wanted to maximize as much storage space as possible. We both love having the drawers for socks and other things we don't want to hang. I love having one unit to hang long dresses but I've also come to realize I don't really own that many long dresses. I did half long storage then and chose a rack which pulls out that I can hang skirts from.
We bought hangers that allow us to hang pants easier. I love how organized everything is. Eventually I would love to add a space for more shoe storage as I would like to keep my heels and nicer shoes in my closet. For now though having a storage spot for the shoes under my shirts works well. My favorite part of our closet though is the hat rack I made Darren for Father's Day. Finally having all our clothes put away and organized really does make our house feel more complete. I can't believe we've been here for 2 years and cannot wait to finish our master bedroom!
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