It's been a while.....checking in to show some progress

Hey guys....it's been a minute since I came on here, but I wanted to show one of my current projects. A couple of months ago I had to put down my 14+ year old pitbull. It was not easy, but it was definitely time for her. Anything longer would have just been extending her misery. Everything was getting difficult for her, and the past few weeks she was eating only sporadically. I put some much into her that I even had a dedicated bedroom for her to use as a bathroom. I put down a large piece of leftover vinyl flooring over the ratty berber carpeting that was already in that room when I bought the house.

I had been using the room for storage, and even painted some of my project toolboxes and whatnot in there. I told my girlfriend that when Spooky (my dog) was gone, we'd turn that room into a walk in closet. We did all of the work ourselves, which included ripping out vinyl and old berber carpeting, then using Nature's Miracle on the particle board subfloor where urine had soaked through. Let me tell you, that stuff is AMAZING! Once the subfloor was treated with that and it dried completely, I put 2 coats of Zinsser BIN shellac primer on the subfloor, then we bought and installed vinyl plank flooring.

The original owners just had 1x4 material as molding along the floor. I used a bit in my router table to give that a nice top edge and not look so blocky. I also patched all the walls and painted them. The original owner had created this room by encroaching on the original garage, then built a full 2 car garage onto the existing garage. Kind of wonky but it worked. They didn't however have any ceiling mounted lighting, choosing rather to mount some wall sconces on the one wall which were inadequate and pretty redneck to me. I re-routed those wires up into the attic and then drilled holes into the plasterboard ceiling for ceiling mounted lights. To explain the ceiling situation.....there is a drop ceiling they installed, that's about 2" below what used to be the old garage platerboard ceiling. The drop ceiling is only 6'8" tall, and because of the limited height and limited options, I went with some very slim LED panel lights that I managed to wrestle into the drop ceiling grid (that was not a super fun part of the job). The lights are adjustable for light color (3.5k, 4k, or 5k) and have 3 different lumes settings. That was the basic shell of the room.

Then we looked on facebook marketplace, hoping to find a clothing store that was going out of business. Well, we found one, and bought 3 major pieces from them - a rolling cart with bins, a rolling hanging rack, and the 8 foot long butcher block table that they were using for the cash register - this has 6 large shelves under it which I'm using 3 of so far with the larger sized milk crates. It took a minute for my girlfriend to be ok with the milk crates idea, but I absolutely LOVE them - they hold a lot and slide right out and I can pick socks, underwear, or folded shirts and sweats out very easily from them. The rolling hanging cart has all of her coats and jackets on it, while the original bedroom closet has my coats and jackets in it, with a shelf overhead.

Then my pride and joy are the angled shoe shelves that I built - there are 18 shelves total, individually adjustable for height, and I used adjustable angled brackets so they shoes are easily visible. I had planned on putting a lip on the front of each shelf to prevent the shoes from sliding off, but so far I've found that's not even necessary - they stay on the shelves just fine (shoe trees are a mixed bag though - smooth ones will slide off sometimes). Each shelf is 13.5" deep, and each shelf is 45.5" wide.

As you can see, the rolling bin cart is split between us. I have 3 bins of wool sweaters, 1 bin of shorts, and 4 bins of pants. She has whatever on her side.

The 2 clothes bars on the other side of the room presented their own challenge as finding the studs turned out to be an impossible task - under the layer of drywall, there was another layer of VERY thick plasterboard that was originally garage wall, so no stud detector or even the super powerful magnets were working to find the studs. So I had to crawl back up in the attic and find the studs from the top, carefully drilling small holes on either side of the 2 studs that I used for the brackets. Even after all that, driving the screws in seemed like I wasn't hitting the studs. The problem was, the entire thickness of the wall was so much that I had to go to 4" long screws to get enough depth to have a fair amount of threads actually in the studs. But it worked out. One those bars so far are my shirts. There's a bit of room left for her stuff, but she's also going to have a dresser and closet and the entry way closet that I cleared out by moving all my coats/jackets into the walk in closet. In my bedroom closet are all my suits and sport coats, and some long sleeved shirts that I used to wear - I may move these shirts into the walk in closet but my suits and sportcoats will stay in my bedroom closet.

The secretary is something we picked up at an estate sale - we'll use those 3 drawers for whatever, and will likely use the shelves for something to dress up the room (I have 2 of my favorite art glass pieces in there now, and 2 little porcelain angels that survived my very hot fire pit when I cleared out mountain of garbage that the previous owner left in the attic when they moved out. I was just throwing boxes into the fire, and these guys survived extremely hot fires, mixed up the hot coals, and me digging out the ashes where I found these both intact. That was my sign that they belonged in the house so we've kept them. Also not in the walk in closet is my boot cabinet - that is shown in a photo here but it's not part of the walk in closet.

Still left to do is figure out what we're going to do above the "cash register" table - but that will probably be hanging some paintings - I think I have 3 smaller ones that I like that will go great in there. I'll update photos once I move them in (pending committee approval, of course).

Anyway, this is my project so far and I'm very happy with how it has turned out and wanted to share with you guys. And yes, a lot of estate sale finds have not been shared here in my absence, but trust they they DID happen. Hahaha.

Warner

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It's been a while.....checking in to show some progress