Naomi

I shared the plans for my closet storage makeover just two weeks ago, and I’m thrilled to report that I’ve already made some progress on this project! As a reminder, here is what I’m going for:

Essentially, I’ll be adding in shoe shelves along the bottom and a drawer/cubby system on one side to give us more useful and differentiated storage, shrinking the coat rack to allow for this, reorganizing, and painting it so that it actually looks kind of nice.

Last weekend, I headed off to Home Depot to stock up on all the supplies I’d need. Am I the only one who always finds that these trips take like 3x longer than I think they should? In this case, I was alone, so it was slow going finding someone to help me get down the sheets of plywood I’d need, and then getting them cut to fit into my car. I eventually got it done, however, buying two 4×8 sheets of plywood (cut in half the long way), screws, drawer slides, and attachments for the coat rack. This trip also proved that a Prius can hold its own in the “fitting big pieces of wood” category.

I decided to start by building the shoe shelves along the bottom, and then deal with the side storage after I have that constructed. Unlike my picture above, I decided to make two shelves so that we’d have three rows of shoe storage (with one being on the floor).

I started by measuring the closet carefully, based on the idea that the shelves should be 12″ deep along the back and as deep as the indent along the sides. Armed with those measurements, I mapped a plan to construct the identical shelves.

Essentially I planned to cut a long shelf for the back, and then add on side pieces to fill in the weird side space that the closet has.

Then it was time to construct! By making the shelves 12″ deep, I was able to use the plywood efficiently by just cutting one 2′ wide piece down the middle, and then to the correct length.

I then cut out the little side pieces and then used my jig saw to cut out the notches to fit around the interior trim. In total, this part of the project used less than 1/2 of a piece of plywood for my pretty normal sized closet.

Of course, I tested them at this point against the closet to be sure my measurements were correct!

Once satisfied, I used a kreg jig to attach each of the small pieces onto the long shelf.

It was particularly handy to have large clamps for this, which were a new impulse purchase that I got myself a few weeks ago. I only had smaller clamps before meaning I had nothing to hold large pieces in place. Having these made me really happy, and made Brad happy, too, since I didn’t need to interrupt his football watching to help me attach the screws. (He’d already done his part by doing a lot of measuring and marking in the closet.)

It’s always satisfying to see a vision come together… even if the vision is just a pair of very oddly shaped shelves.

Of course, I’d be lying if I said the construction came together perfectly… and that’s not what we do on this blog. I had cheated my measurements a little short knowing that I’d have to wiggle it into place in the closet, but I hadn’t taken that into account for the way I cut notches for the trim (which had been based on it laying completely against the side walls). Once I assembled it, I needed about 1/4″ more in the notches for it to actually fit into place. To make life easy getting it in, I used my jig saw to take off a little more:

After that, they fit in nicely, with enough wiggle room to inch them into place.

So how do they look now?

That’s right, they’re still simply strangely shaped shelves leaning in my closet. And you can’t even say that I tricked you given the title of this post.

With everything else going on this weekend with work to catch up on, my writing group, and my weekly writing goals I didn’t have the chance to get them installed on braces, and I didn’t want to rush the job just for a post. Still, this was the bulk of the project, and I know that I’ll get them up when I move on to the side structure And just holding them in place was a little exciting – I can’t wait to have that much shoe storage!

2017 has been a productive year for both of us, one in which Naomi made serious progress in her terrifying basement and finished her dining room makeover, and Sage finally finished her kitchen renovation and made her yard significantly less ugly. Still, as we transition between projects it can be easy to focus on how much more is still ahead of us. Sometimes it’s important to take a step back and reflect on how far we’ve come, so today we thought we’d share a few of our favorite room makeovers.

We had relatives over about a month ago from out of town who were seeing our place for the first time, and I kind of blew my mind talking about what this place used to look like. Spaces that I now take for granted or even want to make changes in used to be total disaster zones.

Take my bedroom, for example, which I was so proud to finish earlier this year but am now totally accustomed to. It used to be a dark, sad hole, and then even our initial updates left it mismatched and a little odd.

This room took a lot of work, from DIYing custom bedside tables, building a storage chest for a non-standard sized space, to finally getting around to painting the window sashes throughout my house. But it was worth it, and I remembered how worth it it was by how proud I was to show them this space.

See the full set of projects here.

But the best example of how I need to do a better job appreciating how far I’ve come is my kitchen. Now that my dining room is done I am giving this room significant dirty looks, and it’s the next major space up for a makeover. It’s hard to remember that it once looked like this:

Oh, the yellow! Put in that context, the kitchen is looking pretty good.

We opened up the wall to the dining room, put in new bamboo floors (since we were already putting them almost everywhere else in the house), and replaced the counter. Then, one of my first DIY projects was installing renters wallpaper as a temporary backsplash. That brilliant project is still standing strong to this day, and has some sentimental value since I wrote it up as a guest post for the blog Sage had before we started this one together.

Sage

One of my favorite space makeovers that I haven’t thought much about in awhile is our front hallway and stairs. We don’t spend a ton of time there, but the dark and drab space definitely bummed us out whenever we walked through it.

We put in some pretty serious time painting, transforming the closet into open shelving, installing new light fixtures, and adding color and interest on the stair risers and through artwork (recap of all those projects here). It’s never going to the the star of the show in our house because it’s still a pretty dark space, but it’s still a pretty big improvement!

On the other end of the spectrum in terms of effort, one room that often gets overlooked but is definitely the winner of “quick and cheap room makeovers that changed everything” is our bathroom. When we bought the house, it was lime green and looked like this:

I hated everything about it — the green walls, the brown tile, the tiny footprint, I could go on…. I turns out, though, that all the room needed was a new coat of paint some colorful artwork and accessories.

Somehow those small changes totally changed the space, making the brown tile no longer look so brown and the space no longer feel so choppy (thanks in part to painting the walls and ceiling the same color). Okay yes it’s not actually a bigger, better space and it wasn’t truly terrible to begin with (I know that some tile just cannot be salvaged), but I’m glad I put in a few hours of work to discover that this room was pretty easily transformed!

It’s so nice to take a pause every now and then to recognize what you’ve accomplished, rather than always focusing on what you don’t like or what you need to do next. There may still be major disaster zones in our homes (looking at you, Sage’s basement and Naomi’s closet) but at least we’re making progress! We’ll try not to take it for granted.