Closet Build

The basement was already finished when we bought our house. Our inspector advised us to just tear down all of the walls and start over since it was not done with permits and then we could make as many changes as we would like. Well, that sounded amazing but we did not have the amount of money that it would have taken to do that much work. Instead, we have been living with the existing floor plan but adapting and making changes to get it to make more sense. I sometimes wish we had demoed the whole thing and started fresh like the inspector suggested because the way it was finished has me scratching my head over and over again. Queue the strange cavity behind this wall.

I know from looking at structure in the open space of the utility room that there are two I-beams holding up the first floor of the house with metal columns on either end of each beam. The two beams with columns underneath happen to be above each end of this bump out here. I think that's why they built the bump out but I decided that it's the perfect spot for a closet. I thought it would be fun to let my boys bust through the drywall so I "Dexter'd" the rest of the room and handed them a hammer and sledge.

In the above picture, you can see the wall of closets that they built into the room on the left. Those are covering the fact that there's a main stack on each end of this room. Now that I've built a closet in a different spot, I will be tearing them down to get an extra 28.5" of width in this narrow room.

The boys made quick work of tearing the drywall down and I found my first obstacle. There was an electrical wire running through the space. It's tough to see but the two metal poles are on each side of this space, hiding in the shadows. Thankfully, my parents came to visit soon after this and I had my Dad's help to get the wiring to do what I had planned with it. There's a hallway on the other side of this wall that has no outlets so my idea was to add an outlet there so that I could cut this wire and add another since there wasn't enough slack to properly attach it along the studs the way it should have been in the first place. It's not a big deal since there was nothing in there but I was about to turn this into a closet so the wire needed to be dealt with. The bonus was an added outlet.

Next, I had to get the studs and giant nails out of the front of the space.

The column on the right was in the way of building a plain rectangle closet and I love to use every possible space so I had to get creative when coming up with a plan.

First, I built a platform to build the closet up off of the ground.

Then I attached panelling to the back (after I secured the wire to the stud and cleaned up the splinters, etc).

Next, I started building the boxes.

There's not a whole lot that you could put on the small shelves but I didn't want to just cover over the space. Also, it evens out the two sides perfectly so that it's a full 48" wide.

Once I started on the finishing touches, it started to look like a real closet.

Next up, doors. And this is where things just kept going wrong. I decided to build doors since it's basically like a cabinet. I've built doors before but not ones this big. I was pretty excited about my design.

The color of the wood looked really nice with the white so I just sanded and applied poly. It turned out beautiful.

BUT it ended up warping as the poly dried.

It closed fully at the bottom but not the top. I worked hard trying to adjust things enough to make it work but gave up in the end. Thankfully, I also have experience installing IKEA kitchen cabinet doors to other things I've made and quickly changed direction. Even that didn't end up as straightforward as it should have. My plan was to just buy the plain, white doors. They don't have any that are as tall as I needed but they have 30" and 40" tall doors so I bought two of each since I have a 74" tall space to cover. Except they didn't have the 30" white doors in stock. What they did have was a beautiful, chevron, wood-look door that I fell in love with. Since I needed to stretch the 70" of doors to closer to 74", I added trim.