Improvising a Coat Closet

Another common complaint of home buyers, and more commonly, families of Love It or List It, is the lack of a coat closet.  Our Basement has more closets than even I could ever fill. Seriously, there are 5 HUGE closets down there, plus another huge one under the stairs, the cupboards in the laundry room, and the big closet in the guest room down there. Sadly though, there was no space for our friends and family to hang their coats, and other personal items when they walked in the door.

 Patrick and I had been struggling with installing our new / salvaged door in the bathroom. Old unsquared doors, with old unsquared in a different way door jams do not make for a happy Patrick.  After several hours, we gave up for the night. I know Patrick though, and he isn’t happy unless he ends on a win.  At about 7:45pm, my timing kicked in again. “Ummm,….I think I’m going to run to Home Depot and explore a bit for a few projects, I need to get out of the house.” Patrick’s exasperated response: “You’re going to come home with another project that you want to do, and you’re going to want to do it tonight, aren’t you?” Me: “Ahhhh maybe, we’ll see….” Forty Five Minutes later I was home with the Matrix once again full of MGD Boards. Did I mention how much I love my car?

 At 8:30pm, on a weeknight, we went to work.  Fresh off of our recent Board and Batten Wainscoting Bathroom project, we had this down to a rhythm. In an hour and a half we had all of the boards up, and caulked.  Yay us!!

 Here’s what we did:

 We started with our top Pieces, again. This time we didn’t have a number in mind for the height, I just made Patrick stand there with the boards holding them up until I was happy with them.  We measured and cut the boards, and cut the ends at 45 degree angles in the corners. We used a level to get them straight, and then ca-chink, ca-chink, ca-chink – nail gun got those top boards up in no time! We did use glue on the backs again like we had the bathroom. Next came the second set of horizontal boards. Again, poor Patrick standing there while I stood back saying “no a little higher, oh wait too far, go back!” In a few minutes the Second boards went up the same way as the first.

Our Horizontal Boards Up

Next I knew that I wanted 4 hooks around the space, so I would need 4 Vertical Pieces. For these we used the 1 ½ Inch wide MGD board again, the same as what we had used in the bathroom. We measured how long the pieces would need to be to fit in between our two horizontal boards, and then to go from the bottom board to the top of the base boards.  We cut the end off at 45 degree angle to help ease it into the existing baseboards, and not look weird sticking out. We tried to space to boards evenly along each wall. The center vertical piece was placed in the middle of the longer wall, and then the two side ones were placed hallway between the center board, and the end of the wall. The 4^th one just went in the center of the shorter wall section. We used a speed square to make sure that our vertical pieces went in straight, and the rest of the boards went up. Patrick caulked the seems, and we went to bed around 10:30 riding high on a win. Take that, bathroom door!

 The next few days I used the rest of the crappy white paint that I had left over from the bathroom to put way too many coats on the wall and boards.  Seriously, don’t buy cheap paint, it will haunt you for many many projects!

 The final step was to install the hooks.  I wanted hooks in the middles of the 1 ½ inch pieces, centered between the two horizontal pieces.  Then I wanted a double wide hook centered in the gaps between the vertical boards on the lower horizontal board.  Fist one out of the gate, I insisted that’s where I wanted it, Patrick screwed it in, I stepped back, and I realized, woops wrong spot! More nail hole filling, more painting. Sorry honey!  Our second try we got them all in the right spot.  We love our new make shift coat closet, it really adds a lot to our otherwise boring entry way. Also, I have a minor coat addiction, most women are shoes or purses, mine is coats. Luckily it turns out that I found a new friend that has the same issue, we are working on weekly support meetings with wine…The downside is now this space is always full of my coats, so one people come over they still don’t have a place to hang theirs.  Well, at least it looks good!