Our DIY Dream Closet Renovation

It is done. Well mostly. Enough to post about it. We built a closet. And not just a closet. My dream closet. If I had known how happy a closet could make me, I would have done this years ago. Don’t underestimate how much this space can affect your mood. I’m slowly learning how to create physical spaces that improve my mental wellbeing. With our backgrounds, you’d think we would know that by now. Better late than never. 

When we moved into our house in 2006, it all needed a little help. But our master suite especially needed attention. When the previous owners moved out they dragged a piece of furniture across the horrid linoleum flooring in the bathroom and ripped it. We planned to change the bathroom immediately. In addition to the flooring, it was just odd. Our shower is big enough to put 10 people in it. No bathtub. An awkward enclosed toilet room and a wall that is made entirely of a mirror behind the sinks. We knew it would be a big project, and kept putting it off. 

Finally last year we decided we needed to address the bathroom. This meant the closet too. The closet is located off of the bathroom. We started sketching new layouts that made sense. The plans were calling for us to tear down some of the shared walls with the closet and to reconfigure the closet layout. The close is huge. And taking up precious space that could be used for a bathtub. I really wanted a tub.

We put our design together. I created my Pinterest boards. I was in love. And then we started realistically pricing it. One of the pros and cons of being in construction is that we know how much things will cost. We had some hard conversations and decided it just wasn’t worth that much money right now. We came up with a list of a few cosmetic changes we could make to the bathroom to allow us to live with it for a bit longer. A new light fixture, grouting the shower black (from the putrid white that had turned yellow), new hardware, a new toilet. We still have some more stuff to do but it’s better. Doesn’t give me a lot of joy yet. 

Once we decided to leave the bathroom for a bit, we started researching the closet options. When we moved in we had California Closets price it for us. It came in at $8k. We passed. Their design was good but it didn’t include everything we ended up doing. After a few nights of Josh on the computer he had me researching the Ikea PAX system and other bloggers. I felt pretty confident we could install the units. I was a bit overwhelmed when I looked at how folks were building in these units to look really fancy. Our finish work is a bit questionable. We watch a LOT of youtube videos and learn as we go. 

Our previous closet was horrible. It had gross carpeting. Our dogs thought my clothes were a great hiding space during games of chase. My clothes were filthy from them. Our wire racks had fallen off the walls so many times that we had unfinished wood blocking nailed to the walls to try and hold up shelving. It was the opposite of a space that brought me joy. It made me want to cry. 

The flooring was kind of the turning point. Or where I feel like the whole design started in my head. I found this post and fell in love with her wood floors. I then found this couple who made their own plank floorings from plywood. I combined the two posts to create our floor. Sounded crazy but it seemed to make sense. We love old big plank floors but really worried about the weight in that space. Also trying to match transitions to the existing flooring was tough. We struggled with wanting a hard surface in the closet but not wanting to introduce another wood tone. We already have two sets of wood flooring in the house. We have no carpet. This painted floor was the solution we had been looking for. 

Once we agreed on the flooring, the vision for the boho style closet was pretty clear in my head. Josh doesn’t always see my vision for how things come together so it took a bit of working. The rug, light and art were the big decisions. We love them all. He also HATED the stool I thrifted but once the space was done he agreed it works. 

The layout of the actual system was by far the hardest part of the whole process. Josh had done tons of CAD drawings to figure it and got very frustrated. Ikea has a tool on their website for doing the layout there that he wasn’t getting to work the way he wanted. I finally stepped in and took a stab at it, based on what he had started with. This online designer is a must. It changed the whole process. Work through it. Use it. Why? Because once we finalized our design I hit a button and it put all my items into my online cart. And then I hit a button that told Ikea to go get all those items and put them on carts for me to pull up and load into my car. 

There were a few things we customized on the fly, but as long as you know your room measurements you can work it. 

Not our design. I forgot to save ours. Oops.

After we created our design, we tested it. We literally created the footprint on the closet floor like an actual floorplan we would use at work. We are such dorks. This was for us to test clearances and decide if we were getting the right depths of frames. At this point you are figuring out the height, length and depth of each unit to maximize your space. We wanted as little unused space as possible. Ikea also sells corner units. I’m not sure why we didn’t buy those but we didn’t. We just created our own corner configurations. You can’t see the unused spaces in the corners. Our ceiling is sloped so that added another layer of complexity with choosing height. We went with the shorter of the two heights on all the frames. The reality is that I couldn’t have reached anything higher. We treat the top like a shelf. The only difference is that if we had gotten the taller units we would have a “top” over the shelf. That seemed unnecessary. 

Once we finalized the frame layout, it was time to design the actual closet. Where would drawers go? Shelves? Doors? What kind of accessories? I can tell you that no matter what, you just never really know what the perfect layout is until you have used a space. It took us some trial and error. Only one thing really didn’t work. I did a lot of googling to figure out spacing suggestions based on types of clothing or accessories. The mirror door was a last minute add. When we removed the door between the closet and bathroom, we also lost our full size mirror. There was nowhere in the new closet that made sense to hang it. But we had this skinny frame right in the middle of the space. It dawned on me. Install the Ikea mirror door. Josh hated the idea. And again he later agreed I was right. It was the perfect solution. And can hide things that won’t stand up pretty like most of my purses. Or the ugly shoes. 

We hit the “add to cart” button and then added a few other items. The hole fillers, genius. Add them. I think I bought 1,000? We had plenty. I also added wood hangers. Josh thought I was crazy but having the simple matching wood hangers totally makes it feel a lot more luxurious. However many hangers you think you need, quadruple it. I’ve gone back 3x for hangers. 

This might be a good place to add that we had an odd strategy for cleaning out and purging our closet. Everything we read said to figure out how much of everything you have and then design the closet based on that. We designed the closet and then purged based on what we had room for. We got rid of a LOT of clothes and shoes. We also still have a lot of open space in drawers not being used. That’s fine. We will figure how to best use our spaces. I also Marie Kondo’s the heck out of all my clothes and saved a lot of space using her folding techniques. Getting to that point was a bit rough. We emptied the entire closet onto our bed and floor. And yes there is a painting of a man sitting on a toilet. We got it in college and for some reason it got put on our bedroom wall for a very short period of time…

While we waited for our Ikea purchases, we got working. We painted the walls first. If anyone ever takes this closet down they will see where we cheated. We didn’t waste time painting the areas that were going to get built over. Seemed like a waste to us. We knew we wanted the majority of the closet to be white with the clothes providing the pop. We used Chantilly Lace on the walls and kept all the Ikea the white it comes in.

Platforms were next. In order to create a true built in look, we had to create platforms for the frames to be placed on. This would allow for a continuous base to be added so that it didn’t look like individual boxes just sat next to each other. This took some math. We had to decide if the base would go over the flooring or not. Josh did a great job with all of this. We only ended up with a few spots where we had to figure out solutions to make the whole unit look finished. Hard to explain but we didn’t want the closet unit ending 4 inches before a wall jut out. The MVP of this step was the shop vac. Much to my objection, we did all the cutting in our closet. It saved a lot of time but I did not want sawdust everywhere. I literally held the shop vac behind the saw and sucked up the dust during and after each cut. I was a bit neurotic. They all turned out great. 

Our first Ikea order was ready and these trips turned out to replace the gym for me this week. I did all the Ikea runs by myself. Luckily I have a huge LandCruiser. I will tell you, not a single person offered to help me. Not once. Shocking. They just watched me. That’s fine. I did it. Josh chose to buy a pickup the week after I took all the trips. Thanks… That would have been useful. Regardless it took two days to put together and install all the boxes. We could have done it in one day but we broke up the work to keep our sanity. 

In between putting together Ikea frames, we made a trip to Lowes. Bless Lowes. We went early on a Sunday morning when there weren’t many people. We actually went to two Lowes. The first one informed us that their saw was down and they sent us to another location. We were skeptical that they were going to agree to cut all these plywood sheets into strips for our plank flooring project. But they did. We quickly realized that Josh is much more detailed in measuring and stepped in to help measure the cut locations. We decided we didn’t need the flooring to be the exact same widths. But at the same time we needed similar widths so we could put them together and not have a jacked up puzzle. Bless our new friends at Lowes. They did all of it. And didn’t charge us anything for the cuts. I can’t imagine how we would have done this otherwise. I would have given up. I think the sheets we got were ⅝” blonde wood. We debated a lot about what the right thickness was. We cut them into 8” strips. They also cut our plywood for the platforms so we could minimize our cuts at home. 

Once all the frames were installed and nailed in, we started laying out the floor. We did it all on the fly and we dry fitted it all. I would literally choose the spots where we wanted the joints based off of eyeballing it. We didn’t want it to look formulaic and wanted some randomness. We used nickels between the boards to create somewhat uniform separation but then cheated in places to make the boards fit the space where needed. The non uniform widths actually helped to get some of the perfect fits. Using our new nail gun (such a great Christmas gift) we nailed down the boards as we got an area figured out. The door jambs were a bit of a nightmare. Josh did them a few times and we got it pretty good. We decided not to paint the floor until the very end of the project. 

Once the floor was installed we picked up our next Ikea haul. We actually separated it into two different orders (1) frame (2) buildout. There is no way it would have all fit into the car otherwise. They were each completely full car loads. Again, so glad Josh bought a truck after this project. Really?

While Josh and I started installing shelves and drawers we had the kids help with the hole fillers. There were a lot. Once they were installed, they weren’t coming out. So be warned. We waited until we knew the placement of the shelves before installing the fillers. The kids could only do so many at a time because after a bit your fingers go numb. No pain, no gain.. As I mentioned, we ended up changing a few of the layouts after we installed them. One was a pants pullout for Josh. It was too big and we had it placed it in an upper location. It didn’t make sense and was just too bulky. It was the only piece we purchased and didn’t use. That change ended up causing us to switch our “sides” of the closet. It was a balancing act to create something that looked right but also was functional.

Now it was time to figure out where the clothes would go. They couldn’t stay on our bed any longer. I did an active purge and organization on the fly. It worked well for me and helped us figure out how to actually organize the closet as we went. I quickly realized we needed storage on top of the units because we had a lot of stuff that wasn’t pretty or easy to organize. Lots of hats. Bulky scarves. That kind of stuff. After seeing an image online I became obsessed with finding these specific white canvas bins. No luck. However I stumbled into the burnt orange canvas bins in the dollar section at Target that week. And then bought every one I could find in Charlotte. They actually work a lot better. White bins might have been too much white in that space. 

We then focused on all the finishing touches. Josh worked for a few nights on all the trim and baseboards. We used strips over all the joints between frames. Again, most of it we figured it out as we went. What looked good and felt finished. Or created symmetry and consistency. I was focusing on things like the screw overs that were visible. I found these nifty stickers on Amazon that work great. The original location for the light was off center and looked really awkward. We ended up moving the junction box over lightly. Both the light and rug are from Wayfair. Love them both. We also found a cased opening kit at Lowes to finish the doorway after we ripped the door out. We still have this weird alcove in the back that I finished off with a plant, planter from Target and a giant black and white print I made for $17. $14 frame from Michaels and a $3 blueprint printing from Staples. 

Some of my favorite features in the entire closet are just the little details that make it more functional. We put these clothes hangers on each end of the frames. We can hang up an outfit for the next day or I use it when I’m trying to plan an outfit and want to see the items together. My jewelry drawer is a game changer. I can fit all my key pieces in one place and get stuff off our counter. I love it. 

Oh and then we painted the floors! Now that we didn’t need to worry about them getting scratched. We painted them the same Tapestry Beige in the Porch and Patio paint recommended from Liz Marie’s blog. We topped it with several coats of poly. It’s subtle but is clearly darker than the rest of the closet whites. 

That’s our closet. We love it. And now I’m ready to finish the bathroom! Oh and I know you are going to ask. I haven’t tallied the exact cost. It’s around $1500. That's for everything. Including the light, rug, paint, etc. We have a huge closet so we used a lot more frames than most. We had 9 separate PAX boxes. We took a ton of photos. Too many to put into the body of the blog. Check them out below.