For the past 5+ years, our hanging clothes have shared a long closet with 30-inch bypass doors and inaccessible dead spaces at each end. I installed two rods in there, one high and one low, but it still was a barely-functional situation. The smaller door on the left is a narrow closet with The Husband's jeans, tshirts, etc., folded on shelves.
I have been working with Peter, a contractor friend of ours, on the remodeling of our rental properties. He and I communicate beautifully, and he always does a super job with anything we have asked him to do. Yesterday, he emailed to say that he has a light week coming up ... and that he will be available to do my closet project! (cue the happy dance)
The dotted lines are the current walls and door spaces. The shaded lines are where the new closet walls will be.
The plan is to demolish the wall that forms the front of the current closets. Peter will build a new wall that continues the line of the wall behind the bedroom door, then bisect the new space with a partition wall to form two closets.
The new wall will fall approximately along the line of the rug fringe.
The part of the project that has eluded me has been the design of the new wall with the closet doors. My original idea was to reuse the sliding doors (which are solid wood and well built), making them into hinged doors, and center the doors in the new wall. This bothered me because it seemed like too modern of a design in this old house of ours.
As I was up there folding laundry last week, I was staring at the wall and I realized that a solution to my design dilemma is SO simple. The new closet wall can be built to look like a whole wall of built-in cupboards. By reusing all three of the doors that are there now, and adding one more door and some molding that we will 'borrow' from another bedroom, we have the materials on hand to make the new wall look like it has been here all along.
This is a quick Photoshop facsimile of what we plan to do. The center 30-inch doors will open into each new closet. The 24-inch doors on each side will be fixed, but they will look like they're operable.
You have to imagine that the doors are painted a nice, clean white, and accessorized with antique glass doorknobs.
Peter and his crew will be here bright and early on Wednesday morning to get started. In the meantime, I have to empty the closets, heaping our clothes wherever there's room for them, and move furniture to make way for the construction.
This is a small job for Peter, but it will be a HUGE improvement to how we function in this old house. (It should only take two or three days.) Stay tuned, because you know I will be in there taking photos of the whole process so I can share it with you as it's happening.
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The work on this project is being done by:
Peter Csemez
Homebrite Renovations
540-295-1337
(If you are in northern/central Virginia and you need a contractor, this one comes highly recommended ... by us!)