Office Closet Part Three: The Reveal

Okay, so the office closet trilogy continues! When I left you last, the closet doors were drying so we couldn't put them on yet. We have since attached the doors, woohoo we officially have a closet again! However, we can't get the doors exactly even. I feel confident we will figure it out though, we just haven't quite yet. But, without further adieu, here is the office closet... 
Before:

 

After:

 

Remember the outlet and coaxial cable we put inside the closet? Well, we have a TV in there now! It just so happened that a bookshelf we had was the exact width to fit our TV inside it. So for now we have our bookshelf in the closet. Our plan is to have a custom built in closet "look" inside. We may keep the bookshelf in the closet and build clothing rods and shelves off of it, or we may purchase an actual closet kit, we'll see. But for now, the bookshelf will work.

Below is the seam binder floor piece we had to put in to cover our gap of exposed sub-floor. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb quite as bad as I thought it would.

So that's our office closet for now. On another note, we bought a bed for the office as well. We wanted a daybed, or couch with a sleeper bed in it. We settled on this daybed from Ikea. It was a great price compared to other things we looked at and when it pulls out, it makes into a KING size bed...pretty awesome! Then, as an added bonus, it has three huge drawers on the bottom for storage.
As with all things from Ikea, assembly was required and the dogs were not thrilled about it.

King size bed!

Here it is all put together. The Ikea mattresses were a little on the firm side,so I bought two twin size mattress pads to put on top. I really love that this bed has drawers for storage.

Now, that most of the difficult stuff is done, on to the fun part.....decorating! Here is a sneak peak of the bedding I plan to use:

Until next time....

-Amy

Office Closet Part Two

Okay so in my last post I showed you the new office wall color and the stripes I decided to do on one wall. But I didn't even begin to get into the closet redo. Just to remind everyone, this was the closet before:

 It was a really bad use of space. Not only was it hard to get things into and out of the closet but to be able to open the closet doors you had to allow enough space in the room for the doors to be able to swing all the way open. I just didn't like anything about it. All I wanted to do was knock out the middle portion of wall in between the two doors to create a bigger opening and put bi-fold doors on the new opening. In my mind it seemed very simple, a weekend project. Four weekends later, we are finishing up. The night that I painted my stripes, my very kind mother and father-in-law drove up from Houston for the weekend to help us out. My father-in-law works for a home builder so he knows a thing or two about this stuff. His expertise was greatly appreciated. Without their help we honestly would not have been able to pull this project off. Thank you Mom and Dad Smith! :)
First step, demolition!

The drywall was cut away from the wall so we could see our studs and framing. Then the framing was removed. A hitch in the process was that the current opening from door to door was going to be an odd size and we couldn't find any bi-fold doors to fit that size, so we had to widen the opening just a tiny bit. I think it was only about two or three inches, but that two or three inches made a lot of extra work because we had to take out the side framing, pull up the carpet and cut down all the trim work to match the widened opening. Already, the project was more difficult than I had thought. There was also an outlet in the small partition of wall we removed so that outlet had to be pulled up. I wanted an outlet inside the closet because I planned to have a TV in this room and wanted to be able to put it in the closet so it wouldn't have to take up any space in the room. My handy father-in-law was able to drop the outlet down through the closet wall and voila, I had my closet outlet. You can barely see it in the last picture in between the two dark streaks on the wall. 

The next step was to rebuild the new frame to the size we needed. Sean and my father-in-law did a great job on this.

Then we had to nail drywall over the exposed framing, and smooth it all out with joint compound and joint tape. Thus, I got my first lesson in floating and taping....and I decided I hate it. Let's just say, when I do something, sometimes I tend to become a little bit of a perfectionist and when floating and taping, your never going to get it perfect, eeevvveerr, so you just have to let that go. I am also just chalking it up to my first time to float and tape and I think if I ever do it again I will be better at it. I'm just thankful that this time it was a small area that doesn't get seen a lot. And, now that we touched everything up, it really doesn't look too bad (more on that later).

So at this point, the first weekend was over and my in-laws had to go back home. From here on out it was just me and Sean....scary....luckily the most difficult parts were out of the way.

The next step was to paint and touch up. After painting over the new drywall, I realized that our current walls had some texture on them (after doing some research I believe our texture is called orange peel), so the new dry wall looked completely different than the existing wall because 1) I could see every line and crevice from our float and tape job and 2) because it didn't have any type of texture to it.  After looking around at Lowes, I found this orange peel texture spray in a can and it worked great. Not only did it make the wall look more uniform, but the texture also helped to hide a lot of the imperfections from the float and taping. So I sprayed the walls with the texture and repainted them, then I moved on to the inside of the closest. I sprayed the inside of the closet with the same texture spray, then painted over it once it had dried. I painted the closet the same color as the rest of the room. 

You can see in the picture below how awful the wall looked before I put the texture on it. 

 Also, Sean and I (mostly Sean) were able to drop a coaxial cable down in the closet wall also, so that we could hook up the TV in there. I was really proud of him for being able to do this!

 Now we had to cut all of our trim pieces to fit the new opening. We salvaged as much trim as we could from the old openings. We didn't change the height of the opening so the two side pieces didn't need any trimming but the baseboards on both sides, inside and outside of the closet did and the top pieces did. I carefully measured and marked them all and trimmed them down with the miter box and saw. A miter box is a really great tool for trimming, and pretty cheap. We got ours for about $10. It allows you the get a perfect 45 degree angle or straight cut. However, it does require some muscle to use. I was definitely feelin' the burn as I was sawing through the trim. But my cuts turned out good and I got a workout in the process so it was worth it. Then I painted the trim and it was ready to be put back up.

 So by now, you can probably see that there is an issue with the flooring here. The room was carpeted around the previous two closet door openings, so when we removed the wall that separated the two doors, we were left with a section of bare floor in the middle (it's the grayish spot of floor in the picture above). Luckily we had two spare rolls of carpet remnants that the previous owners left at the house. Our plan was just to make a straight cut across the new opening and then cut a second piece that fit inside the closet and matched up with the other seam. But that would have been too nice and easy, so of course that's not the way it worked out. One of the rolls of carpet we had was more than wide enough but it was about a foot too short to cover the whole length of the closet. The other roll was long enough but as you can see above, it was about three inches too short. Three inches! We thought about cutting multiple pieces of carpet to fit the closet but didn't want a bunch of uneven seams everywhere. So after weighing our options, buying new carpet or reflooring the closet with something else, we decided to buy a seam binder. They make a lot of different types of flooring products for merging carpet to wood floor or seaming the flooring at the threshold of a room. We were able to find one that was five inches wide. We needed something this wide because our gap was about three inches wide and we would need our piece to overlap on each side so that the carpet could be tucked under securely. We bought the piece in natural wood, with out any finish on it and I stained it a dark walnut brown stain that I already had. I forgot to take a picture of it by itself but you can see it below, next to the new closet door as I was trying to decide on a paint color. Yay, no more carpet gap!

 I narrowed down my paint choices to three different colors: The top white-ish color is the same color that I painted the lighter stripes in the room, the middle color is a shade darker than the wall color and the bottom color is a cool gray that I really liked. Making this decision probably took way longer than it should have. I really wanted to paint the doors gray, but even though I thought it would look great, between the gray doors and the dark brown floor piece under them, I felt like it wouldn't have been very cohesive with the rest of the room. So I decided to play it safe and paint the doors the warm white color that I painted my stripes in. I thought this would help tie the room together. If I decide later that it's too boring then those closet doors will probably be getting painted gray, but for now we'll see. Currently, the closet doors are drying so I can't show anymore as it's not done yet. We are nearing the finish line... Be back to post the finished product soon!
-Amy