Pinspiration for a coat closet!

Are you on Pinterest?  I love Pinterest, which is an online inspiration board.  See something on the web that you want to try?  Pin it to your Pinterest board to remind yourself later.  I use it mainly to help remember great recipes I stumble across or for easy DIY projects.

The dream closet featured on Martha Stewart.

One of the best projects that I had pinned to my Pinterest board, was a coat closet makeover.  The original inspiration came from Martha Stewart.  See how nice and neat this closet is.  With shelves on the bottom you easily have room for shoes and the baskets located at knee height make looking for scarves easy for us shorter gals.

I fell in love with this design and asked Chris if we could redo our closet.  He was totally game and went to work with his new favorite program, Google SketchUp.  To set the stage, our coat closet is. . . well, closet size.  It has one door, and it had two upper shelves and the clothes bar.

I knew that in addition to our coats, mittens/gloves, hats, and scarves I wanted to also have room for the shoes we frequently wear.  I also wanted a space on the upper shelf for the two boxes of Christmas ornaments I have. With this in mind, Chris and I measured the ornament boxes and that height dictated how tall the upper shelf would be.  Then, Chris added the clothes bar into the design, and finally, the two lower shelves were added to the design.  Here is his Google sketch:

To get a sense of how much of the closet is visible from the door, Chris did two sketches, one with the walls and one without.

After the design of the closet, Chris and I got to work scraping layer upon layer of wallpaper out of the closet.  That was the biggest time-consuming part of this project.  I would say we easily spent two 8-hour days taking turns scraping out seventy-one years worth of wallpaper, and there were six different papers.  Personally, I hate wallpaper.  I would much prefer paint on the wall to a design that I will likely become tired of in a few years.

After we removed the last bit of wallpaper, we went to Benjamin Moore to get a Carolina blue paint for the back wall and white for the two side walls and the ceiling.  The paint went on quickly enough, and Chris was able to start measuring the shelves and painting them white while waiting for the closet to dry.  Once everything was dry, Chris installed the shelves and the clothes rod.  Here is what the closet looks like today.

In our new and improved coat closet, Chris's shoes go on the floor (so he can just kick them off) and mine go on the first shelf.  On the second shelf, the basket on the left holds our scarves, and the bag to the right holds, in addition to my backpack, Frisbee, and football, my other pocketbooks -- you can see what's used most frequently! ;)

In terms of our coats, both Chris and I love our outerwear.  I have 7 coats, and they are all hanging in this closet.  I actually am a bit ashamed that I have that many coats.  Chris only has four in this closet (they are hanging out of the picture in the right of the closet, you can just barely see his hoodie), but our guest bedroom closet has the rest of his coat collection, 8 additional coats!   Dude, if you're keeping count (like I am!) the man has 12 coats.   

 

Previous owners at some time in the past installed hooks along the back of the closet and that is where we keep our hats, and hanging from one of the hooks is a Colonial Williamsburg bag where we keep our flashlights.  My Christmas ornaments are on the upper shelve on either side of a wooden basket that holds our ski gear, goggles, gloves, earwarmers, etc.

On the door of our closet hangs a shoe holder that I have had since the late '70s.  My godmother lived in China then, and sent this back to me.  Now it holds our gloves, hats, lint brushes, and other lightweight items.  This item is starting to show its age, and as it's one of the things I treasure, I try not to add too many heavy things to it.  Below this on a row of hooks, hangs our laptop case.

Again, pictures of the inspiration and the fruition.

Our closet.

The dream closet featured on Martha Stewart.

  

Office 2.0

I mentioned in a couple of posts ago that Chris and I easily work together in our new and improved office space.  So here's the lay of the land.  Chris and I live in a Georgian Revival built in 1941.  It is a spacious 1200 square foot house.  Way bigger than what the two of us really need.  Included in the square footage is an addition that at one time was probably a screened-in porch, but when we purchased the house previous owners had enclosed it, drywalled, added carpet, and turned it into an office.

When we first moved in, we agreed that the office would be my space (and Chris would have the basement).   I've looked and Chris has looked for pictures of what the office used to look like, but neither of us can find them.  However, Chris did use Google sketch up to redesign the space and he started by sketching the space as it looked.

The office as it once looked.  Drawn in Google Sketch Up by Chris.

The room is rectangular with a door leading to our back deck on one side and a huge window looking to the front of our house directly opposite.  Underneath this large window is a great built-in desk that features a narrow book shelf on the right.  On the long side wall there was a series of cabinets and shelves.  I imagine they looked great when they were first installed, but the years have not been kind to them, and the shelves were pulling out of the wall -- to the point that I was afraid to put anything on them (but eventually I began storing lighter items there without any problems).

When we decided to redo the room, Chris used Google sketch up and the two of us weighed in on what we wanted.  We agreed that a long desk in an L-shape running along the two outside walls would provide needed counter space.  Chris has a lot more things than I, so he wanted his desk to have upper shelving, and I was delighted to stay in the spot in front of the window.  Actually, my spot hasn't changed all that much.

The office as we imagined it.  Drawn by Chris in Google Sketch Up.

The first step in the process (after clearing the room) was to tear out the cabinets.  Not a difficult task as they were practically falling out anyways.  Next, Chris built a long desktop to create the L-shaped desk.  It joins nicely with the existing desktop; you'd never guess they were added separately.  

Once the desktop was built, we needed to weigh it down, so the glue adhered.

The way Chris chose to attach the desktop was pretty ingenious.  To avoid using too many nails (and thereby reducing the weight of this sucker), Chris built a narrow shelf along the two walls with a groove cut out on one side.  Then, where the desktop meets the walls, he added a tongued piece of wood which was inserted into the groove.  All this was secured with globs and globs of wood glue.  Finally, he joined the two desks underneath with a brace.

Next, Chris focused on the shelving.  He built an overhead 2-shelf cabinet over his workspace and carried the top of that cabinet as a shelf that extends the length of the wall.  To divide our workspaces, and provide more storage, he then built a center bank of shelves.

The shelves installed.  (Ignore the wallpaper leg, it was there for support during the build.)

Once the shelves were installed, we went to Pottery Barn and purchased the Bedford 3 drawer file cabinet to match the one we previously purchased when we first moved here.  That adds storage, and perhaps more importantly, adds support for this long, floating tabletop.

So Chris worked on the office project 3 months ago.  Care to see how it looks today?  Check out these photos!

And here is Chris's side of the office: