Today we are covering the project I'm personally most proud of, I did this 100% myself and it turned out much better than expected! I bought the bars but the shelves were the bulk of the work which I used only scrap wood and paint we already had for, so if you also have scrap wood hanging around (the renovations just seem to produce endless wood off cuts here) and are looking for things to do this could be a good lockdown project.
Here's the before and after to get us started, the before photo was the day we moved in and before any work started.
Obviously the rest of the bedroom has had a lot of work done as you can see from those pictures, which is covered here, but this post is just about the functionality and fittings in the wardrobe.
Having a built in wardrobe in the UK isn't necessarily a given, so we are lucky to have a one in the master bedroom. However it wasn't really laid out to use it to its full potential so I did some work to get more from it, if you want to look at how to get more from a small built in wardrobe this might be helpful. The wardrobe is the small door here on the left (flashback to the bedroom pre plastering and carpet!)
At the start it had two hanging bars next to each other to the right of the door and one shelf over them, but lots of wasted space otherwise. The whole of the part in front of the door was empty. Maybe you could put a small unit of drawers or a shelving unit in there, but I was aiming to be able to hang all of our clothes in here from our two wardrobes and also get some of our other clothes in here too.
It seemed like enough space for this but I just wasn't sure how to lay it out. Firstly I looked online for different layout examples to see what was generally done. Pinterest was a really good tool for this. Lots will have hanging bars on one side and shelves on another, which unfortunately we couldn't do as the wardrobe is asymmetrical with lots of space on the right and none on the left to hang anything or add shelves. Secondly after I got some inspiration I thought about our clothes, how much hanging Vs drawer space do we need? Our old set up was one wardrobe each but mine had two bars, so 3 hanging bars should be sufficient. However Tom's wardrobe also had a lot of shelf space and I had been using the chest of drawers all to myself (which we are now sharing) so we also needed a lot of non hanging space. I had originally thought about adding 3 bars to the right at different heights then shelves going across the back wall, but it felt like we would have less shelf space than we needed as the shelves wouldn't be very deep and half of them would be covered up behind the clothes hanging on the rails
In the end I decided to go for deep shelves to the right where the two bars were originally, and then add three bars at different heights across the wardrobe. This would give us lots of both hanging and shelf space. We generally have less clothes hanging than in drawers so this worked for us and I knew the deep shelves could hold quite large boxes. These are all the tools I used (as well as a level for marking the shelves which I have just noticed isn't in this photo) so its not a complicated project, the crowbar was only for removing the existing front off the step so I could recover it more neatly so may not even be required if you don't have things to remove.
I measured up the space and decided on equal height shelves with a larger one at the top, as that might be where we would store bulkier lesser worn clothes like snow and cold weather clothes as its not easy to reach day to day.
I used all scrap wood and plaster board for this project, the only thing I bought were the three hanging rails and brackets for them (and the lights although they were a more recent addition) so it was super budget friendly and minimal waste. It was a great way to use up scrap wood too. I just used lots of pieces like this with pilot holes pre drilled for the shelf supports. The hallway does not look like this any more thank god, this was a project I actually did ages ago but haven't got around to photographing until we got the lights installed as it was too dark in there to really get any decent photos (which is why some of these step by step ones are a little blurry).
I started by painting the inside of the wardrobe white just with our supply of matte white (renovating a house we get through a LOT of this) to tidy it up, eventually I also painted the shelves and step white too.
I boarded up this hole in the step (the stairs run under there) after fishing out what looks like an old a wedding photo as well as some things we will not speak of. Let's just say I'm very glad I had gloves on. It was then thoroughly doused in disinfectant and boarded over.
I fixed each shelf just using a wooden strip under the shelf for the board to sit on. I didn't attach the shelf to the wood so that we can adjust them and easily take out shelves or add more in if needed. I thought that with use I might realise that the shelves may need adjusting, for example maybe I might find we want more shelves with smaller boxes but the ones we have seem to have worked fine.
I staggered the bars so that the clothes aren't all hanging over over each other and placed them at different heights.
Here we go into the more recent photos, we have since painted the bedroom and all the trim so the door surround and door are a nice crisp white and the walls obviously look about 1 million times better!
The middle bar at the front is for our day to day clothes, my dresses, Tom's shirts and suits which are in daily rotation. See the difference the lights inside make too!
The top bar at the back is for maxi dresses and skirts and lesser worn things (but that we still want hung up).
The bottom bar has Tom's lesser worn suits folded up in their bags, and my skirt and trouser hangers. The carpet fitters fitted an off cut in here for us which added a nice extra touch. I feel quite fancy having a built in carpeted wardrobe to be honest!
The boxes on the shelves have things like pyjamas, tights, leggings and miscellaneous trousers, gym wear, knitwear, jeans etc which don't need to be hung up. I will eventually get some more of the grey boxes so they are all matching and nicely coordinated, we actually have a couple spare I just haven't got around to switching them out so that may be another lockdown job.
We do also have the chest of drawers with our tops, t shirts and underwear, eventually I may move this to the spare room when that room is decorated and get a wider one or even two chests of drawers side by side for in this room. This is a second hand old solid wood one, so I can't go out and buy a matching second one to put next to it, but it doesn't really fit into the space very well and we could have a double set there. I have my more formal dresses and suits in storage under the bed with the coats and jackets we don't wear daily. There are quite a lot of shoes and accessories (clutch bags, scarves, dress jewellery etc) under there too, with only our day to day shoes and accessories in the porch. The ottoman bed is a really good storage solution, we got it when we lived in our rented flat with no loft or shed or built in storage so it was full of things we now have in the loft. It's lovely to have the space back for some more day to day storage though and frees up the wardrobe and shoe storage in the porch. I really don't need my heels and cocktail dresses often so it's good to have them to hand but not in the way.
The lights are a recent addition, they are battery powered ones you press on and off. They are 3M bought from B&Q a couple of months ago. I added two inside the door frame, one on the wall then one under each of the shelves. Our bedroom doesn't get the best light and before I added these the shelves were quite dark so it was hard to see what was in the boxes. I found I was hauling them out every morning to get a particular pair of tights or specific jumper out, then invariably didn't have time or motivation to wrangle them back into the shelves because I designed this so the boxes are used like drawers as the clothes on the rails get in the way of putting the boxes back in so there were often boxes hanging around the bedroom floor, but these lights have solved that issue! They are also really handy for anything like sheds, attics, cupboard under the stairs etc where you may not have a hard wired light. The batteries don't last long if you leave the light on (I have accidentally left some on all day and they have run out already) so they aren't for a place where you want light on all the time but for a spot like this they work so long as you remember to turn them off!
I'll leave you with the before and after again just because its a good one :)
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