The Making of My Dream Closet

As any seamstress knows, you can never have enough closet space!  When your hobby is making clothes, you don't want to hide them away, and you have more of an emotional attachment to them than you do store bought clothes, so you keep them longer.

After many decades of boxing up my wardrobe at the end of each season to store it and make room for the next season's clothes, I finally convinced my husband to give up his rarely used home office so that I could turn it into a walk-in closet/dressing room.  Convincing him was the hardest part- I seriously had to work on him for a good decade before he finally gave in! But, he would use his home office once a month to pay bills, and I knew that I would use the closet everyday. 

Here are my before photos.  We repainted the walls a soft blue before doing anything-its the same color as our bedroom, which is right across the hall, so it kinda of seems connected, and I don't have to go far to get dressed in the morning.   We decided to use an online closet company called Easy Closets.  They have an online design tool that you can put any measurement into and play around with various configurations.   We had to work around the window placements and doors, but they have units of all sizes, so you can do it.

The components all were shipped and labelled very clearly.  We had to remove our car from the garage for a few days, as it took up a lot of space!  Now, you could hire someone to put everything together, but we are do-it-yourselfers, and decided to tackle it on our own. 

The first thing that you have to do is attach a stabilizer track to studs so that you don't have to worry about the weight of the components falling. You have to be good at measuring, but hey, we sewers should be good at that!  And you'll definitely want a power screwdriver.

Then you put up the outside panels which essentially hang on the track.

And then come the shelves, drawers, and closet rods.

And finally, the clothes and shoes can spread out and breathe!!!  The track is pretty much invisible once the clothes are hanging.

I think that the this took us about 3 days, not including the painting and moving out the office stuff.  I'm sure someone with construction know-how could do it much faster.  But it was definitely a good feeling to have accomplished it!  Windows are kind of a mixed blessing.  We normally keep the blinds down to limit sun damage to the clothes, but it is nice to have the option to get in some fresh air.

We had a ton of left over boxes that I put up on Craigslist and had plenty of takers.

I know that not everyone desires a big closet or has the luxury of a whole room to turn into a dressing room/closet, but if you're lucky enough to have the space and dream of a bigger closet, I can say that I really, really enjoy it and would do it again in a heartbeat.

As my daughter says-it's like going shopping in a store where everything is your size!

Happy Sewing!
Ann