What to Consider When Planning A Walk-In Closet

We are in the midst of planning/ designing our walk-in closet. The first step to designing a walk-in closet is deciding on dimensions by drawing up a floorplan. (To back up, here’s where we are on our upstairs renovation project!)

When we bought the house, there was no walk-in closet in the master bedroom. The first phase of the project is demo-ing an old random fireplace that apparently exists behind the wall in the hallway to make room for a new, big walk-in closet for our bedroom.  This fireplace was covered over in drywall and its chimney stopped at the height of the attic floor… definitely not use-able. It probably hasn’t been used in over a century.

The bricks are old– likely original to the 1892 construction of this part of the house. Our contractor and his guys started the project by taking out the bricks one by one and carrying them downstairs to the yard.

Creating Space for a Closet

Here are some of the piles of bricks they created:

Super cool, right?  And before you ask, “What are you going to do with the old bricks?”, allow me to share that I’m up for any ideas.  Right now I’m focusing on just getting this renovation project complete and using all my creative juices on that… but I know those bricks are going to have some amazing feature in our home at some point. (Spoiler alert from 2021: eventually, we used the bricks for a walkway connecting the front porch to the gravel driveway.)

So they took out the old concealed fireplace/ chimney (by the way, they stopped at just the upstairs rather than take out the one that apparently exists on the first floor too… because I was overwhelmed with all the dust this created and they said they could always come back and demo the rest downstairs another time.  Plus maybe I’ll peal back the drywall downstairs and expose the old brickwork to make a fake fireplace one day or something.).

Here’s a picture of the old closet in our master bedroom, with our super cute model.  🙂

BEFORE:

Next step was tearing out the old closets (one was the one pictured, and to the right, you can see a part of the sliding door closet) to create one massive space.  The contractors then put down a floor and walls to create one big walk-in closet to the left and one small little closet to the right.

Closet Construction: New Walls, Ceiling and Floor

We chose a new pine floor that they hopefully will stain to match (as much as possible) our old pine floors in the bedroom.

The walk-in-closet’s doorway was awkwardly close to the doorway leading into the master bedroom so we opted to make it a pocket door (my mom’s suggestion!).  Works beautifully!

The contractors did all the drywalling and priming, and then David and I got to work and did the heavy lifting of painting the inside of both closets. (I’m joking– of course painting is work, but nothing compared to what they did!) Rather than use the same beigy-pink as the bedroom walls or a boring white, we decided to go with a pretty blue paint.  I wanted something that evoked “calm,” which is usually the antithesis of a closet, but I have a hope that we will keep these closets calm and tidy, so blue seemed to set the scene.

DURING:

(The paint color we chose was “Blue Bayou” 0615 by Richards Paint and I LOVE it.  We got it at Childress Paints in Charlottesville.  I’ll do a blog post later on this brand of paint but suffice it to say it was awesome.)

Painting the Ceiling and Walls the Same Color

After we painted the walls and ceiling a lovely Blue Bayou, our contractor installed a light centered in the closet that illuminates the whole thing well. We chose to paint the same color so that the eye would not stop at the ceiling line but make the space feel larger. The light helped a lot. (Edited to add: as of December 2021, we have not had to replace this soft florescent light and have really been pleased with how it’s worked!)

I’ll share the rest of it with you soon!  Love the progress that is happening!!  Hope everyone has a good rest of the week.