ADD CLOSET SHELVING to any builder-grade closet!

Once upon a time, there was a unappreciated closet in the guest room. It housed my old prom dresses and random other nonsense.

Since it was the guest room, we rarely went in there and it just didn’t matter. IT JUST DIDN’T. But then it did. It started to matter when our guest room became our twin girls’ room a couple years ago…

…at which point this closet suddenly had to hold lots of pink and purple little garments.

Nick was gone for the day, so I decided to impulsively tackle their closet.

Since the ONE shelf was suuuuuper deep (like two feet), I hauled it out to the garage and ripped it in half with a circular saw. Then I put one back in the same place, and popped in some wooden brackets to hold up the second shelf down lower. Because unused wall space in a closet is WASTED SPACE.

My thought process behind the height of the lower shelf is that I wanted the girls’ hanging clothing to be accessible to them, but wanted it high enough that their dresses wouldn’t touch the floor. SUCH A SIMPLE FIX.

This worked decently well for over a year, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there’s still SO MUCH WASTED SPACE. So I decided to do something about it this week! The one wall to the right could have shelving without taking away from the function of the other shelves or clothing rod.

I bought a bunch of 1×10 pine boards for the shelving, and cut part of one into these 2×6 chunks of wood to be my brackets. The rest of the boards became the ACTUAL shelves! 10” deep

I marked out where I wanted my brackets to be, made sure each one was level, and shot some nails in with my cordless {affiliate link}>> AirStrike Bradnailer.

Since our house is 117 years old, nothing is level or straight, so I measured how long each shelf should be before cutting my 1×10’s. Some of them varied by up to 3/4 of an inch!

I know the brackets under the shelves aren’t very pretty… and I could have used a strip of wood that extended the full distance under each shelf to make things look more cohesive. But that just seemed like a waste of wood. And once everything got a coat of white paint, it looked just fine!

We actually took the shelves out to the garage to paint with a roller, and just hit the brackets with a paint brush.

OH! And I should probably discuss what I did at the bottom of this wall! I wanted a big area for the girls to stuff their dress-up clothes. So I nailed a couple vertical brackets on either side, and stacked two 1/10’s and nailed them into place. SO SIMPLE.

As you would expect, the fun part was loading up allll their brightly colored EVERYTHING.

Obviously you can see that it would be SO EASY to customize this how ever you wish to fit your organizational needs. If you don’t have little girls, you probably don’t need the area for dress-up clothes. Or maybe you want to add a corkboard or pegboard above one of the shelves for jewelry, or to hang pictures, OR WHATEVER YOU WANT! Make it your own! Make it function for you!

 

Please like, pin and SHARE with a friend who has small children, or loves organization, or BOTH!

And also! Check out how we added tons of storage to the nursery closet and added similar shelving in our master closet!

MUAH!<3