Planning and Demoing Our Master Closet

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Our master closet was a mess! I just made over the guest room at this point, so on top of what was already in this space, the guest room junk got stashed in here as well and it was out of hand! I wanted our closet to be organized and useable, so I got to planning. I drew up my original plans as you can see below.

The left side.

The back side with shoe storage.

The right side.

But that was drawn up several years ago and my ideas had evolved. So this was part of my new plan for the left side.

I wanted there to be cabinets and drawers, kind of like the photo below from House on Longwood Lane. We have 2 dressers in our bedroom and I’d like to be able to go down to 1 dresser with more useable storage in here instead. Tyler agreed to get rid of his safes if he could have a hidden area in our closet for his guns and ammo to use as a safe. We came up with a plan of taking 18 inches from the back wall and building a new wall in front of it and use a mirror as the door to the hidden room.

But first things first, we had to demo this mess of a closet! We emptied out the floor, we got rid of some things and moved other things to the guest bedroom while this closet was being remodeled. Then I started removing all the trim and the floor. I planned to build cabinets in here and if this floor was floating I’d need to remove it. We didn’t have these floors installed, the last homeowners did, so I had no idea if they were floating or even what material they were made of.

I used my trim puller to remove the baseboards and door trim.

Once the baseboards were off the first piece of flooring was a little tough to wiggle out of place, especially with the safes still in here that I was trying to work around. But I got it to come out! Turns out these were floating floors and they are made of thick MDF made to look like wood. These floors are nice but I had other plans for this space.

They had a moisture barrier and padding underneath, that’s the red stuff you see.

The areas by the tile were hard to remove because there was glue by the tile holding the transition piece in place. But with a little force it came up.

I ordered 2 rolling clothes racks so we could hang our clothes up and move them in the guest room until we were ready to put them back in here. They were a little flimsy, one of them broke so we returned it and Amazon sent us another and that one worked just fine. They may not be great long term but they worked for a month or so for this project and they were easy to put together.

I rolled them into the closet and transferred all of my clothes to it and Tyler did his side.

Our guest room was back to being unusable for the time being.

We cleared out the rest of the closet so we could remove the shelving.

Tyler helped me with this part. The shelves are made of particle board and are heavy and long and he could maneuver them out of the closet better than I could.

We got everything taken out and we now had an empty room to work with. It seemed so much bigger in here once everything was out! I wasn’t worried about the walls being messed up because I planned on building full cabinets with backs.

Do you like demoing? Some people find it fun and therapeutic, it’s not terrible but it’s a lot of work and it’s not my favorite thing to do.

Next up, building out the back wall for hidden storage and building the cabinets.