A Sidequest : Part 1

Once we moved my studio downstairs, my office on the third floor was empty. The third floor has ALL the closets in the house, and the bathroom we use primarily is up there. So all of our clothes are ALSO up there! I have too many clothes. And shoes. For real – WAY too many. I started to work on some editing. Oakley is overwhelmed.

While it’s too much, I DO wear everything. It’s one of my favorite ways to be creative when presenting myself. There are four identical closets on this floor, all in different rooms. I have two, Doug has one, and the other is storage.

To tell the whole tale, I suppose I should show you the space when we bought the house – pre-wide lens, so it’s a terrible picture. But that tower top is magical.

Here’s the space after I moved into my studio. The tower top is to the right of this picture, and the closet for the room is behind. It’s fairly small and WILDLY angular. Which is such a fun feature.

With the office room empty, and having moved out of Doug’s third-floor office years ago, we had two rooms with really no purpose, besides being an utter disaster. I thought – since the primary bedroom won’t be done for years, what if I made my old office a dressing room, so all my stuff could be in one room? THEN, we could move Doug’s clothes in to the closet in the third floor bedroom, and THEN his old office would become a place to work on lighting and crafts and messy things. This – to me – was a super smart use of space to make things work better.

And of COURSE, once I had this brilliant idea, I had to make it happen RIGHT NOW. And I needed it to happen as CHEAPLY as possible.

Here I am! Excited to begin.

In this post, I am going to show you some of the process, and then the next post will be all the before and afters.

This is the current closet in the room. My thought was to outfit it with some shelves and a double row of bars for hanging clothes.

Across from this closet on the other side of the room, we added a bar for hanging clothes. I did edit some things and measured everything, so I knew I’d have enough space. Putting this under a slanted wall was going to be a really good height. I know this isn’t the best picture, but you can see the added bar on the left.

Look at all of these delicious angles!

I went back and forth about whether to paint the room. I decided to, because it’s been decades since it has seen any paint, and that gave me a chance to fill in some holes in the wall. And paint is a pretty cheap upgrade. I chose this VERY pale peachy-pink. It’s so pale you almost don’t notice it once the room is together. In hindsight, I would have gone one shade deeper on the paint chip.

Going up on the walls! And the ceiling. Because really, in a room like this, you can’t really tell where the wall is and where the ceiling is. At least I don’t distinguish between the two!

You can also see in the picture above the board we added to reinforce the wall. (Please reference : too many clothes.) All the lumber for this project was scrap we already owned, and all the closet rods and brackets were either repurposed, found in the basement unused from another project, or purchased – I think we purchased just two brackets, so less than $15.

I used some old spray paint to make the electrical covers gold (brass?). They might not last long, but again – super cheap with what I had!

The shelf for over the rod in the room was cut from the old office desk of mine. SO FANCY. It was a piece of particle board ply that we bought to sit on some filing cabinets THREE houses ago. It has lived a great life and this is a great reuse.

Of course, there ARE a few things I bought for the space. But I tried to keep it inexpensive. This dresser was a Facebook Marketplace STEAL. It was also a complete terror to get up to the third floor. I measured this place and kept an eye out for something to fill it. It’s like it was BUILT for this spot.

It also looks like it’s smiling and happy all the time! Here’s a little video I made of the room at this point – basically all the structure is in! You’ll see a couple other things in the room at this point. The sweet second dresser with the mirror is a family piece – and matches the paint scheme of the Facebook dresser perfectly. Inside the closet are a compact set of shelves. And in the room is a VERY narrow tower of shelves. The shelving units I bought online – super cheap.

I reused the rug from my office that was up here, because I love it so much. You can also get a better look at the dresser that came from Doug’s family.

If you see the baseboard heater in this picture and worry that I’m a moron about to burn the house down, don’t. It’s not in use anymore!