HELLO HELLO my lovely readers! It’s been a much longer break from blog posts than I initially anticipated, and for that I am sorry for leaving you in the dark. I hope that some of you were able to follow along with what I have been working on in our house via social media. From mid-summer until now it has been a hectic handful of months. My husband and I were taking advantage of the nice outdoor weather while we could for projects while also juggling a lot of social events in our lives. It had felt quite overwhelming to also be creating blog posts during that time, and the last thing I wanted to do was throw together posts I wouldn’t be proud of. So as I sit with a tiny moment to breathe this week, I figured I’d share the information about our front closet.

This closet is located right behind our front door in the living room. It’s the only closet we have on the main floor, which automatically makes it the “dump zone” for anything we don’t want out. This made for an absolute disaster of a closet! The closet itself didn’t have any organization to it, there wasn’t a rod to hang stuff on and it didn’t have any shelves. As a temporary solution I did move our old shoe rack into the closet to give our shoes a somewhat home. However, as you can see in the picture below, this did not solve our “dump zone” problem.

With this jig it makes it easy to create as many pocket holes as I need. (If you are someone who doesn’t want to spend that much on a jig you should take a look at some of their smaller systems because they have some smaller ones that I’ve heard great things about.) For my pocket hole placement on these boards I made sure I created holes towards each end of boards I was putting them on. That way whatever boards would be connecting would be secure in the front and back.

The next step was finishing up the top portion of the closet, the rod and the shelf. For the rod I bought a 1.5” wooden dowel from Home Depot and cut it down to the length I needed. I then bought some metal rod brackets to secure it to the wall. When it came to the shelf above, I used the same 3/4” plywood as I did on the lower cubbies and I secured it above with 3 smaller boards that were screwed into the walls. This acted as supports for the top shelf board. To finish that off, I took some scrap 1/4” plywood I had and ripped down a piece that could act as a front plate for a finished look.

Once all of the building/installing portions of the project were complete I moved onto caulking the seams between the wall and the trim while also wood filling any nail holes. Then I moved onto the painting portion which included primer first on the raw wood and then the color. To stick with my “use what I had” motto of the project I decided to paint it Muted Sage by Behr which was the same color I used for our guest bedroom accent wall. I thought this was a fun color to use in the closet because it’s unexpected and also helped tie in the other green accents I have in our home. After painting the color I made sure I added a top protective coat since the shelves would have our shoes on them a lot. For my protective top coat I used Varathane Transparent Matte Clear Water-Based Triple Thick Polyurethane.

After all of that work, we now get to enjoy an organized closet that has a designated spot for our shoes, coats, and winter accessories in the baskets above. If you have a closet in your home that’s always a disaster I recommend creating something that is custom and gives your items a specific home. You can feel free to reach out to me if you’re not sure what to do with your storage space and we could work together to create a plan! I’d love to hear from you in the comments below since it’s been so long since I’ve shared a blog post. Even just a Hi Marissa would bring a smile to my face!

Cheers!

Marissa