When I scraped the loose paint off these doors during the main renovation of the house, it revealed how many colors these doors have been in the last 40+ years. Eventually, I will take them downstairs to the workshop, and give them a nice coat of white paint ... they function just fine the way they are, so the cosmetics can wait till later.
... like the 'spacious' 1967 closet that has double bypass doors, with wasted dead-end spaces at each end beyond the doors. To make best use of the space, I installed double closet rods ... my clothes above, his below. This leaves NO SPACE for anything other than hanging clothes. The smaller door you see on the left is a linen-type closet where The Husband keeps his folded clothes and a hamper.
My folded clothes (sweatshirts, hoodies, sweaters, and pants) are in an antique armoire on the other side of the room. My hamper is beside the armoire, out in the open. It's a less-than-ideal situation, but it's relatively functional.
My eventual solution to the problem is to do a mini-remodel in here. I have figured out that if I remove the wall where the closet doors are now, and carry the line of the wall behind the bedroom door across the room, the loss of 28" of floor space on the closet side of the room (which we can spare, because this is a large room) will result in two 4-1/2 x 5 foot walk-in closets! The new wall would roughly follow the line of the carpet fringe. I have a couple of other projects to finish before I can even think about starting on this ... I'm still trying really hard to stick to my resolution to finish things before I start something else ... even if it's something like this that will make life better.
As I was up in our room sorting laundry the other day, I had a brainstorm. We have a cabinet from Ikea that has been used in lots of rooms in our houses over the years ... most recently in our grandson's room to hold toys. He doesn't live with us anymore, and his toys moved with him, and I was pretty sure that the now-empty cabinet would fit into the space between the closet corner and The Husband's night table.
I didn't even need The Husband's help to get this done. With the doors and shelves removed, the cabinet wasn't all that heavy. I took the feet off of it, and it was short enough to go through the doorways ... so I flipped it upside down onto a folded blanket and dragged it down the hall and into our room. Then, I put the feet back on, flipped it upright into the space, and put the shelves and doors back into place.
Ta Da!!!
Lousy photo, but you get the idea.
Now I'm scheming a temporary way to obscure the glass doors ... perhaps gathered fabric or frosted-glass Contact paper ... do they make such a thing? I don't want to do anything permanent to the doors, because you never know where this cabinet will end up once the closets are finally built and we don't need it in our bedroom anymore.
This is not a perfect solution, but it will buy some time and help me get better organized by giving me a single place for my shoes to live ... and I won't have to hunt all over the house to find my shoes anymore!
