The Closet is Finished

The closet in Ephraim and Tabi's room has been a work in progress since not long after we moved in.

For the first few months the room was a storage room, but then we had to get it ready for Ephraim to move in, so we had his crib empty in the nursery for Joie.

When we began taking the random shelving off the walls in the closet, we found that nothing had been anchored properly - most boards had just been nailed in and the plaster started crumbling off the lathe.  The little part sticking out on the right (that all the boards are leaning on) of the above picture is a brick chimney.

Here's how the walls looked after we removed the wood shelves - pretty wretched, right?

This is the standard picture you'll see later when we actually have things in the closet - it looks much better later!

Apparently a 100+ year old house has some brittle lathe.  At this point, we considered tearing down the whole closet and hanging drywall, but we weren't really gung-ho for that.  Instead I claimed "Genius" in this old post.

I repaired the lathe enough to place some new plaster.  It took lots of coats, lots of sanding and lots of late nights, but it was worth it!

Add a coat of blue paint to match the room and you can't even see the damage (much).

I really don't remember having this bookshelf in the closet, but we must have when we moved Ephraim in - his clothes are near the bottom and his blankets and sheets are stacked on his bin.

 Here's the bin of out-of-season clothes and flooring pieces in the background.

All the random items that had no designated home in the either of the kids' rooms ended up in here.  No decorations on the walls yet - there's Tabi's "T" that hung above her crib in the apartment.

Here's the closet today!  I love the closet system we have - we've been using it halfway for a while now, but it was never screwed into the wall and some of the shelves were missing.  The left side is Tabi's and the right side is Ephraim's.

The upper shelf holds extra blankets and sheets for their beds.  The rod holds all of their church clothes and jerseys.

Ephraim's non-hanging church clothes sit on the top of his solid shelves, since he doesn't use them often.  Then they each have two shelves with their every day clothes on them and jammies.  Then the lower shelf holds little bins (which the kids picked out today) with undies/socks/tights/under shirts/etc.  I was able to leave just enough room under the bottom shelf to slide the bin of correct-size-but-out-of-season clothes for each kid.  The laundry bin sits in the corner and we have a small hanging corner basket-thing that hangs off to the left, but was accidentally torn down.  This holds each kids currently-wearing jammies.

I am so excited with how this closet turned out.  I know it won't look like this for long, but a girl can hope, right?