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Custom Closet Under $250!

When we gave our 11 year-old daughter a room remodel for Christmas, I didn’t realize the closet would require the most work…but the result was totally worth it and I did it for under $250!!

I had always planned to put built-ins in the closet, but due to the odd size of the closet, I assumed they would have to be custom-built . Now I’ve got some solid wood-working skills, however building a functional space with a bunch of drawers and shelves was a little much for a working mother of two, with basketball and lacrosse games to attend, business travel, and a desire to sleep now an then…So I assumed I’d have to spend a few thousand dollars to get a “real” carpenter to build this custom closet.

At the same time, I had posted the kids’ baby furniture (which Payton had been using as her dressers) for sale on Letgo and Facebook – two high-quality pieces of furniture: a four-drawer dresser, plus a changing table with three large drawers, one small drawer, and a cabinet. In 30 days I had only received one inquiry – the woman was ready to buy them until we realized she was in California and I was in Florida…note-to-self, if you post items for sale on some of these sites, they flag your location automatically based on the location services on your phone at the time you create the post. I couldn’t sell high-quality furniture that had cost $1500 new (and still looked new) for $200! WTH?

And that’s when it hit me! I measured the depth of the dresser drawers and realized I could reuse them in the closet! Woo Hoo! I might be able to handle building out the closet myself if I didn’t have to build the drawers…But the more I worked on the plan the more I realized…I could use the furniture bases as well, not just the drawers!

So I went to work! I started dismantling the pieces with a crowbar, a hammer, and a screw gun. But I also love my power tools. My new favorite is the Milwaukee battery-operated circular saw. I’ve never been comfortable handling a full-sized circular saw, despite the fact that I use the table saw, the compound miter saw, jig saws, sanders, drills, and so on. But we recently got one of these babies and it’s changed my life (ok, my project life). It’s smaller enough and light enough for me to use with ease…and there’s no cord to get in the way.

I pulled off the tops and all the trim to get the framework down to just the boxes. I left the drawer glides in place so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting them put back in place level and such. Then I used the Milwaukee saw to cut the tower off the changing table to get it down to just a bank of three large drawers. I also had to empty the closet of all the household junk being stored there, remove a bulky laundry chute that was never used and very much in the way, and replace a section of flooring over the laundry chute (not to mention match the green stain on the pine flooring by watering down some leftover green paint from years past). The laundry chute demo and floor repair turned out to be easier than expected.

And so began the rebuild…I bought a single piece of 4′ x 8′ 3/4″ furniture-grade plywood (which Lowes cut into strips for me so I could get it in my mid-sized SUV), and some pine shelving. I used those items and some wood screws to essentially “box-in” the frame of the four-drawer dresser, add a set of shelves above it, and attach it to wall. I added some 1″x2″ strips to support the front and back of the shelves above the dresser.

I did the same with the three-drawer dresser on the opposite side of the closet (photo below) but I didn’t add the shelves above that one. I also used inexpensive 3/4″ shelf-edging to finish the exposed edges of the plywood.

Next I had to prime, caulk, and paint it all. I found plenty of leftover white paint in my garage to put a fresh coat on the walls. I used old based paint over the raw wood. But let’s talk about the top coat of paint for the built-ins for a minute…If I’m going over an old finish (the exposed portions of the dresser boxes, plus 7 drawers) I absolutely, positively, ALWAYS use this Farmhouse Paint that I buy at Uptown Vintage Market in Melbourne. Check them out at www.uptownvintagemarket.com/ or, if you are outside the Melbourne area, look for a Farmhouse retailer near you www.farmhousepaint.com. This paint is easy to use, incredibly durable, and makes it easy to get the high-quality vintage look you are going for.

I found some fun cabinet pulls on Amazon for about $2.50 a piece. I needed 28 of them, and didn’t want to spend a fortune! I also bought a little more wire shelving, and the related support hardware, to finish the hanging space around the back side of the closet. And that was it…here is the finished product…


Budget

  • Wood: $100
  • Cabinet Pulls: $75
  • Wire Shelving/Hardware: $30
  • Paint: $40

Tips

  • Before you attempt to sell old furniture like dressers and tables, look to see if there are elements you can reuse. You won’t get much selling them, so if you can re-purpose for another use it might save you some serious money.
  • If you want closet built ins, look for old dressers or shelving on Facebook and Letgo that can be converted. If it’s in good shape and has good, simple bones, you can change the color, the knobs, etc. to save yourself time an money!
  • Don’t be discouraged by odd shaped closets that seem dysfunctional…with a little creativity and some handiwork, you can make even small spaces highly effective.

My Walls are Now My Table

The day we discovered the 100 year-old pine v-groove walls behind the drywall was one of the best days of our renovation project. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them exactly, but I knew, without question, we were saving them!

We had spent months gutting the old cottage (affectionately named “The Love Shack” – long story) and had already salvaged about 1000 square feet of pine bead board from the living room, dining room and kitchen. There was so much of it I had started giving some away to local artist because we were tired of pulling out the nails.

The two bedrooms in the cottage had drywall walls and some old pressed board ceiling tiles, so we left those for the official demo crew to demolish. The demo crew knew how sentimental I was about the old house…so they were so excited to show me the old wood that was hiding behind the more modern materials that had covered them for half a century or more (probably an effort at insulation back in the day).

One of the bedrooms was peach, the other was the most gorgeous peacock blue I’ve ever seen. The demo crew pulled them out board by board, in almost perfect condition. We also had them save all the interior wall studs throughout the house. This gave us a stockpile of salvage wood that was a bit overwhelming. My Mother’s Day gift 2017 was a rack my husband built me in the garage to hold all the salvage wood. LOL

It was time to bring in a professional, and there was only one person I would trust with this much of my precious salvage wood. Noah Hosburgh of Seranoa Artworks (http://www.serenoaartworks.com/index.html) had already done two amazing project for me on the renovation. He’s an artist and more importantly, he gets me…I can draw something on a napkin and he will build it exactly as I saw it in my mind.

When I told Noah what I wanted built, he was in, ”it’s always fun to see the beautiful or interesting wood that comes out from under an old finish, especially nasty old paint where you can’t see the wood at all.”

We pulled enough wood for the table top, plus a bench for one side. We selected pieces long enough so we wouldn’t have any seams. We also mixed in a few of the wall studs For added dimension. I told Noah I wanted the imperfections, like nail holes, to show.

Noah picked them up and got started. “First, each piece of wood is skimmed in the thickness planer and boards that are unusable due to severe twists and such are removed from the mix. Boards with slight bows will have no problem clamping up straight. Next, boards were trued up on one edge and rip cut to remove the tongue and groove, then planed to create a good gluing surface.”

Noah continued the process, “I set up a balanced pattern of thinner and thicker boards, also paying attention to tonal value as well as character. To control the final flatness, smaller sections were glued together first so that those smaller slabs could be trued up before creating the entire slab. After this step any moving of the slab requires two or three people because it is heavy!

“I used a hand held electric planer to remove the highest spots, then various hand planes to work the surface down to the final plane. (This is my opportunity to get some cardio in, occasionally switching hands so that my body is not visibly lopsided ). I love finishing off a slab this way, with areas of slight grain tear-out. It really emphasizes that this is a real piece of wood and the subtle texture pairs perfectly with the existing aged nail holes.

“After crosscutting the ends it starts to look like a table slab.”

Once Noah delivered the table and bench slabs, we mounted them on top of industrial frames I had made by Bold MFG & Supply (www.boldmfg.com), who I found on Etsy. Then I coated the slabs with a few coats of satin polyurethane, sanding lightly between coats.

I paired them with some cross back dining chairs from Wayfair. I have the same chairs in walnut finish at the breakfast nook table and love them! I still want to find some black wicker arm chairs for the ends of the table, but so far I’ve had no luck.

We LOVE the new table and bench and everyone who sees it immediately takes notice of it’s unique beauty. Now, if I can only come up with an equally brilliant plan to use the hundreds of square feet of bead board we still have stacked in the garage!

Other projects we did with the V-Groove:

Growing Up – A Room Redo

It was inevitable…at some point every girl imagines a new room for her teenage years. A room much hipper and cooler than the cute, childish room you created when she was a toddler.

For Payton, that childish room hosted a giraffe theme, adapted from the nursery bedding we chose when her older brother was on the way in 2004. When it was time to ditch the crib, we had my uncle build a custom platform bed with a nice carpet area where we could curl up with a book (and usually the dog) at story time each night. I had painted the drawers in the bed with the same giraffe print I had used on other accessories for the nursery in 2004. It was tedious task, hand-painting giraffe spots, but it was an act of love. But fast-forward about 10 years and Payton was over it, and I was tired of the big bulky carpeted platform that took up half the room.

About a year ago, Payton began asking for a daybed. I’m not sure what the infatuation with a daybed was about, but that was all she wanted. So for Christmas I wrapped this up as her big gift. And so began the redo…

It turns out choosing the daybed was the easy part. Within a few days we had searched Wayfair to find a high-quality version with a trundle for her friends or cousin to use for sleepovers. The bed was delivered in a week (we definitely weren’t ready.) The hard part was dismantling the custom platform bed and getting that out of the room. It was a well built, beastly thing, that weighed a few hundred pounds and would have lasted her a lifetime if she had been so inclined. I finally gave it away on a Facebook garage sale site, and the family who took it hauled it off in pieces…ironically, for a teenage girl’s room (face palm).

The Before Pictures

To be clear: Most of what we used in the redo was new, not salvaged. But we completely changed the look without changing the sage green wall and floor color, or the white bead board wainscoting, and we reused a silk plant, some misc. accessories, and several small furniture pieces we already had around the house, including:

Wood bookcase: I sanded off the giraffe spots, painted the outside Pigeon Blue (Farmhouse Paint), and aged it with some sandpaper and a rubdown with brown stain. Otherwise it’s exactly the same and in the same spot as before, between the bathroom and closet doors.

3-Drawer chest/side-table: This little cutie is on at least it’s fourth life, probably because it’s small enough to go almost anywhere. Before the room redo it was used to support an end of Payton’s desk. I sanded off the giraffe spots and finished it with the same Pigeon Blue treatment as I used on the bookcase.

3-Legged side table: Previously weathered gray, I had been using this little gem in our bedroom, but it never really matched. So I primed it, painted it bright green with some old paint from the garage, and aged it with some Rethunk Junk glaze tinted white. Now it’s perfect next to the trundle bed because it’s easy to move when we pull out the trundle, and the legs go well with the side chair I found at Home Goods.

Re-purposed kitchen cart: This, too, has had many lives…most recently it was a bedside table in a guest room. But since it was the perfect size and height to support the new desk, and had a cute wicker drawer for storage, we painted it French Blue (Farmhouse Paint), and aged it with the white glaze.

Let’s talk about the desk…My favorite part of the room, hands down, is the desk. I would have LOVED a desk like this when I was a teenager. The dark blue leather bar-height chairs were the inspiration…I was wandering through Home Goods when I saw them. They screamed “teenage room study station” to me – reminding me of hip common area in a trendy college dorm or study hall. I initially came home without them, but they haunted me. I studied the space in her room for hours to see if I could make it work.

That’s when I figured out that by moving the clothing drawers to the closet (see Custom Closet Under $250) we could free up a whole wall to install an eight foot long (almost floating) desk. So I went back to buy the stools and began shopping for a something to use as the counter top.

I considered having a laminate top made for the desk, but I didn’t like any of the sample colors, Then I thought maybe a live-edge slab of wood for a more earthy feel. In search of that, I ran across a wood supply house that would make me a sleek slab out of maple for about $350! It has the thick chunky look I wanted, but more sleek to go with the leather chairs. The best part is we stained it a fun blue color, by watering down the Pigeon Blue paint we used on the bookcase and chest, to get a fun nautical vibe. Several coats of Polyurethane later and this is the result.

The rest of the room pretty much came together by hunting down bedding and accessories at Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, Home Goods, and the local vintage markets. I also had to do a fair amount of touch-up on the wainscoting.

Payton put her own touches on the room by selecting some of her favorite knickknacks to put back on the shelves, a few fun table top items from the vintage markets, and a stenciled sign she made when we had a girls night out with some friends at The Rustic Brush.

My favorite part about a project like this is that you can splurge on a few pieces (for us that was a high-quality bed, fun bedding, lots of pillows, and the desk slab), and then use creativity and bargain shopping to pull together a great, one-of-a-kind space.

Payton loves her new room (almost as much as I do), and it was a fun project we worked on together! The only one not happy is the dog, since she doesn’t fit in the side chair with me when it’s time to read.

More After Pictures

Tips

  • Start with something you can build off of. For me, that is almost always a fabric, like the nautical bedding Payton chose. That becomes the palette for the room.
  • Be realistic about the scope. This room already had pine floors stained a soft green color (with a similar color on the walls and carried into the adjacent bathroom). We weren’t willing to sand the floors down to change the color, or gut the bathroom, so the new design had to work with those elements.
  • Let the space evolve. Once we assembled the new bed, it was so much easier to visualize the space and make decisions about the remaining furniture. The desk would probably never have happened if I had tried to plan the whole room up front.
  • If you’re going to DIY, be patient and enjoy the process. I loved every bit of poking around stores and markets with Payton to find inspiration.