Below are the posts about our office closet if you need to be updated:

The birth of the office closet.

Closet halfway done.

Plastered Closet.

So, instead of waiting for the closet to be painted, I decided to put up the shelves and put all our stuff in it, and I’d take care of finishing the closet later, when we were actually officially going to work on redoing this room completely. The only thing urgent about the office was getting this closet in a functional condition so we could put things in some sort of organizational order.

So I made some shelves out of thick plywood. I cut the plywood on the table saw. Then I painted them white. Then I screwed the plywood shelves into these shelf brackets:

*Photo taken from Home Depot.

So, we had a few shelving units that we could use along the wall in the office, so I put some stuff on those shelves and I couldn’t figure out which order the things should go along the wall so I took a picture of two different placements:

Placement 1:

Placement 2:

Placement 2 won.

Here’s the closet with the rest of our junk in it:

Here’s the closet with the doors closed:

I made each door out of 2 2′x4′ thin plywood pieces and I used 1″x3′”s to frame them. I screwed them together, painted the outside white, and then I put some cheap knobs on them. (Later I would put another coat of paint on the doors before we put the house up for sale).

The problem with my closet is that the walls in this room weren’t plumb (vertical term for level). Also the floors aren’t level. Most of the floors and about half of the walls in our house weren’t level. I didn’t take that into account when building the closet. So I made it exactly the same plumb as the wall it’s attached to. This wasn’t noticeable until later when I had to put the doors on and they would either swing open, or not line up right. Door frames have to be level (plumb), so that’s why there are huge shims on the lower right side of the door frame, and the upper left side of the door frame. It was really bad. But I refused to rebuild this closet from scratch, so we ended up having a bit of a crooked closet… at least it fit in with the rest of the house. It was either a straight closet with crooked walls in the same room, or crooked everything, which ended up making everything look straight in the end. It was like an illusion.

I’m not super proud that I built a crooked closet, but I am proud that I made a sturdy functional closet. And I’m definitely glad that I got to finally organize all this junk:

And at this point, the closet isn’t done. We still need to paint it, and put up some moulding and caulking, and then you’ll see how good it turned out… however, we are far from me showing you the finished product of this room. Kyle and I kind of do things all over the place, so we start a project and then kind of start other projects as we’re working on one project, so things are always going to be kind of random around here at 1house1couple. But stick around because soon you will see what color we chose to paint this room!

p.s. it wasn’t pale yellow!