Master Closet Redesign: The Final Product

We finished putting together our closet over the weekend! Nothing about this set was difficult but it was time consuming. 

Here are some pictures of the finished product:

Angled view of my side of the closet

Looking straight into the closet

Clothes

Look at all of the shoe pullouts :)

My husband's side of the closet

Another view of my husband's side

Overall this project cost about $1100, and it was money well spent! We feel like out closet is so much more usable now. I really like being able to easily see all of my clothes and shoes. I'm even wearing an outfit I completely forgot about today, because I can finally see all of my clothes.

Our next project is going to be switching out the light fixtures in the basement, because we don't like how they're two different, generic fixtures.

Hope everyone is enjoying their new homes or builds!

Master Closet Redesign: Demolition and Painting

We got our big shipment of all of the closet pieces from IKEA a little over a week ago. This really motivated us to get moving on the closet redesign, so we headed to Home Depot to pick out paint. We went with Beach Foam by Behr. 

After we got paint, paint supplies, and extra spackle, we started to remove all of the annoying wire shelving. Luckily we have a driver so my husband was able to get all of the screws out pretty quick and i collected all of the wire shelving to use as storage in the garage later. Then my husband spackled all of the holes while I start putting up the painters tape. We waited a day for the spackle to dry and sanded it. Then we started painting. We really love the way the color turner out, and we're probably going to use it in our master bathroom too. It seemed like the paint RH uses is super absorbent. We went with one level down from the Behr Marquee line and still need about 3 coats. 

We also took a trip to IKEA for a mirror and ended up getting a new light for the closet as well. My husband is getting really good at switching light fixtures so he put up the new one as soon as we got home.

Here are some pictures of our progress:

Before: Light Fixture

Before: Closet

So much tape...

After: paint and light fixture (closed)

After: paint and light fixture (open)

We actually got all of the frames built during the blizzard this past weekend, so I will probably update again later this week.  Hope everyone in the area enjoyed all of the extra snow!

Master Closet Redesign: Planning

Towards the end of 2015, we started talking about redesigning our closet so we can get more storage and a full length mirror in there. I'm not even sure how this ended up becoming our top priority, but once we started talking about it, we decided we had to do it. In reality, there's nothing really wrong with our current closet but it's a fun upgrade. I think part of the desire to redesign the closet is we're getting the itch to do some project in the house. Since we're holding off on paint until after our 1 year drywall fixes, there really isn't much else we want to do and nothing is pressing at this point. 

So I started looking into different closet systems and running different closet planner applications to get price estimates. We ended up deciding on IKEA's PAX system. We really liked the look of it and it was the cheapest system we designed plus IKEA is right down the road so we can always add drawers, shelves, or other accessories at any time. 

As we were looking through all the different layouts, we decided that we really wanted to have shoe pullouts and I wanted a small drawer for jewelry. We also decided we wanted to get white to keep the closet light and bright. Since we decided to get the system in white, I'm thinking about painting the closet a pale blue to add a hidden pop of color to our bedroom. For now, we decided on each getting a taller version of this PAX system for our sides of the closet. I switched out the side shelves on my side for more shoe pullouts since I have a lot of shoes and added an accessory drawer for some of my jewelry.

The system went on sale for January so we ordered everything and it's set to arrive on Saturday. I can't wait for my new closet!

New Year, New Projects

I hope everyone had a great holiday season! We are ready to kick off 2016 with more projects around the house.

For starters, we updated our dresser for our master bedroom. Since our bedroom is full of dark wood furniture we wanted our dresser to be a fun color that would really pop. Our comforter has a really nice red/coral color in it, so we decided to go with that.

Rather than buy a new dresser we decided to update my old dresser mainly for sentimental reasons. This dresser was originally my parents when they first got married back in the 70s, and I moved it with me when I first moved to the DC area after college. I have already painted and switched the hardware on it 2 times in the past, and moved it multiple times between apartments and now our house. We knew we wanted to keep it so we just had to update it to go in our bedroom.

To get started we took a pillowcase from our comforter set to Sherwin Williams to pick our paint. Everyone there was super helpful and we found a great color match. After we had the paint, the dresser sat in our garage for months while we slowly sanded, primed, and painted it in between other projects. In hindsight, we probably should have invested in a sander, but instead we used good old regular sandpaper, which took forever. The painting also took a long time since we wanted to let everything dry for a few days in between coats. Ultimately, the finished product turned out okay, but it was really hard to cover up the blue paint that was on the dresser when we started.

Here's the before and after:

Transformation from blue to coral

That's all I have for now. Our next project is redoing our walk-in closet, so I'll post an update once we get that started. Happy new year everyone!