While living in our house, we always had one room that was the junk room. The first room that housed all our excess junk was the office. When we moved in, anything that didn’t seem to have a place, we just piled it in the office room. So it looked like this:

You could barely walk into the room, not to mention do anything in there. The room desperately needed a closet because I was just so tired of walking by that room and seeing the floor covered with boxes, nick-knacks and junk. And I refused to be one of those people (forgive me if you’re one of them) who just closes the door so I don’t have to “see” it. Mainly because I have x-ray vision and I would still be able to “see” it even if the door was closed! lol!

So, I decided to build a closet just to the right of the door. We actually don’t have a picture of that area before I started building the closet, but here are the pics of me starting to build the closet:

To make the closet framing, I built a wall on the open side of the room next to the door, then I attached it to the floor. I also built an extra wall connected to the existing wall on the other side so the ceiling would have something to attach to. There is more than one way of doing this, and this was my first time building something like this, so that’s what I did. Then I attached 2x4s along the top to create the ceiling framing.

I made sure that the closet was going to be deep enough to put up hangers, and then an extra inch or two of extra space in front and back, and also about another 3 inches more of space in front for the doors/door-framing.

Once the framing was up, I used extra bathroom drywall we had left over from the master bathroom (that’s why it’s green (mold resistant)) and I used extra plywood we had left over from covering up the exterior where the big window in the master bathroom was removed (and the little one was put in its place).

Typically, you would just use regular drywall for this, but for me, using plywood for the interior sides of the walls served as a double purpose because you don’t want to put up door frames connected to drywall. It’s better to just connect it to wood, so this worked out for me. I was trying to be resourceful and not buy more stuff (& save money too). So this closet was almost free to build. However, the doors cost money and I did make the doors myself. We’ll show you that in a later post.

For now, here is the debut of our office closet halfway done:

You can see that I’ve already used tape and joint compound to seal the drywall cracks (because I’m a joint compound master by now!). The back of the closet is the existing wall that was already there. And yes, there is going to be a plug inside the closet. It’ll work. I decided to only put one coat of joint compound to smooth out the back wall of the closet because I figured it wouldn’t really be seen much anyway since it’s in a closet, and it’s in the back. That weird swirly design ion the lower half of the back wall is from the glue that helped hold up the wanescoting that used to be there.

Also, on the outside, I put up the wanescoting that I took down from the original wall before I started building the closet.

I made this closet open at the top because the ceiling in this room is pitched and also, it would make it feel like the closet is taking up less space in the room. I picture someone putting their children’s trophies on top of the shelf, on display, or something like that.

Now all we need to do in this room is:

• put another coat (or 2) of joint compound all around the interior and exterior of the closet
• paint the inside of the closet white
• put up shelves in the closet (ASAP so I can put all our junk in the closet space)
• frame the closet doors
• build the closet doors
• put up the closet doors
• make the closet doors work correctly
• smooth out the rest of the textured walls
• paint
• replace the floor
• replace the door
• replace the fan

Okay, now it’s time for you to comment