Inside Jobs

The blog may have been lying dormant (hibernating, if you will), but not so the house. To wit: my Valentine's Day present to myself was a bedroom closet redo. Our closet is huge - actually, we are super lucky to have tons and tons of storage space in this house, but was configured poorly. And configured is really not the right word for it - that sounds like some kind of effort went into planning it out in some way. Just picture a builder's standard thing: one long hanger rod all the way across, and a shelf over it. Not just meh all around, but a terrible use of space. Of course, I failed to take a before picture because of my excitement to plunge into the project.

In any case, ta-da!



I took the old IKEA bookshelves that Misha has owned since early childhood (and you say IKEA stuff doesn't last!), and covered them in white contact paper, which is a faster way to "paint" things like this, in my experience. Luckily for me, they stacked up to exactly the right height! Then, Misha's side got two closet rods, for shirts and for pants, and my side got just one rod, way up high, to make room for my boots underneath. We gained so much clothes storage space that we actually were able to donate one of our old dressers! Amazing. Here is another beauty shot of the double-rod side:



The other big change was mounting some track lighting in the kids room. Good-bye, floor lamps constantly in danger of falling down - hello, bright halogens of actual illumination:



I got to break out those fun paddle-like drill bits for this one, since I had to mount the tracks with ceiling anchors. Honestly, I would say that this should be a two-person project - or at least so I was told by all the YouTube demo videos that I watched before doing - but I managed ok on my own.