Bigger House Bigger Problems
A lot like a tiny house, but bigger
I've learned some things, I still have a lot of things to learn. Let's take a look at all the new learning that lies ahead.
Relationships require closets
But they need to be the right closets and these closets simply won't do.
Now I don't mean to rant but honestly I'm not sure what the thought process was when they were building this place. Best I can assume, it was done by some drunk guys with hammers on the weekends who had a plan but forgot to check on it before throwing in the walls.
This is the master bedroom closet. It's not great. Likely a fine closet for a single guy but that isn't the case anymore.
Here is the master bathroom closet. A 6ft x 6ft walk in closet with mirror bi-fold doors, mismatched wire shelving installed across the doorway, and way too much 1990s vibes. I hate bi-fold doors and linoleum floors so we might as well tear everything out. At least these are my reasons. Kayla's reasoning is that a closet(that isn't a linen closet) in a bathroom is gross. I guess she has a point. Luckily there is a great solution to this.
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| Take out the walls for a more open concept |
Remove wall(s)
Maybe it's more than three steps it took me like 3 months. First, we remove all that shelving because it was gross.
Then we rip out the drywall.
Stop for a beer, soak in the work, and start to wonder "why is it like this?". This wasn't the first time I had this thought about something in the house. Honestly that thought crossed my mind when we saw the zillow photos but it hits different when you see behind the drywall.
This house has coax run through it. I spent a few hours trying to tone out the connections and I couldn't. When tearing this wall out, I found two coax runs that ended mid wall. What in the fuck.
Anyway. Here we are with (most) all of the demo work done. Like every project of this sort, the real work starts somewhere around this point. I need to: frame in the old bathroom entrance, re-frame the bedroom entrance to fit a swing door, change the electrical more than assumed, add some fancy features, drywall the inside, drywall the outside, extend the flooring, add a door, change the lights, paint, and finally add some (not wire)shelves. We are also going to add a side project of building a linen closet inside of this closet. Let's do that.
I had to rebuild this wall for a standard swing door because rough framing for bi-fold doors doesn't look like rough framing for swing doors. You can see some efforts towards the electrical which was not quite as simple as you'd want. You can also see some efforts toward the linen closet which required a bit more demo and electrical work.
I swear the original plans for this house, if there were any, intended for this to be a single walk in closet. The framing for the bathroom entrance was a bit scabby but overall the entire wall was built on 16" centers from end to end so it wasn't much work to return this wall to the standard framing ideals.
Looking pretty normal. Let's put some drywall on that so the bathroom has walls again.
nice.
Alright. We've turned a bit of a corner at this point. We aren't done with anything really but we can nearly start to focus on actually building a closet. The old stuff is out, the new stuff is starting to go in. We have framed the wall back in, framed up the bedroom facing wall, moved some electrical around, but we still need a linen closet.
Yup that's a linen closet. No door yet but we'll get to that later.
Drywall
Ok we skipped some steps here so we will recap. The wall on the left was a 4ft opening for a door. The bit in the back left is the new linen closet. All of the three light fixtures were evenly spaced(as if the electrician knew this is how it should have been built), but there were still some changes to make. I needed outlets because I need outlets. I needed switched outlets because low voltage lighting is the future. And I needed low voltage crossing over to each side of the room because no one likes a visible wire. Then I patched up the seam where the old wall was, added drywall to the new section of wall, and closed in the linen closet. A couple weeks of drywall application and sanding went by then I put a coat of primer on it and was surprised with my reasonable quality work.
I told you I'd get around to that linen closet door. Excuse the really wild paint decisions in here. We have plans for the bathroom which includes flooring and paint and that weird shower decision(60"+ shower framed in for a 48" drop-in surround. wtf) so we will leave that as is for now. But you can see the newly covered wall and much more usable linen closet.
I also added a door. Doors are a bit of a conversation around this house and one of the main contributions to the name of the blog. It took a couple months of using the doors to realize they made no sense. Both closets had bi-fold doors which is dumb. Because of the bathroom closet, the bathroom door had to swing out into the bedroom. Because of the bathroom door swinging out into the bedroom, the bedroom door needed to swing out into the bedroom instead of keeping the hinge side towards the bathroom wall. It really was a progression of bad decisions seemingly all because of the bathroom closet's unneeded existence. Also note the updated lights and that oddly placed low voltage ring on the right wall. That is for the low voltage wire that runs through the ceiling to the other side, which has a combo wall box with an outlet that is controlled by the light switch. I added this so I could add led lighting to the shelving.
Flooring
There are a few ways to extend or add flooring to 30 year old existing maple flooring. Typically you would run the flooring a different direction to help excuse the color mismatch, or use a whole different color because it will literally never be a perfect match. OR you can get three different variations of custom matched stain and apply them then sand them off until you are a husk of your previous self with no motivation left to change it again. That is clearly what I did. Anyway, it's not as apparent IRL and the addition of 7000 of Kayla's garments with a cute rug really makes it unnoticeable. The flooring was an arduous process. It was expensive to get "narrow" 3/4" hardwood maple shipped in, time consuming to sand to the right level of smooth, and soul sucking to sand again and again until an acceptable color match was found.
Shelving
We contemplated a dozen different shelving options. Lowes, Menards, a few other places, building something from scratch, and then we found these. They were certainly something to file under "big boy purchases" but holy shit are they worth it.
Take a look at that! Miles of shelves and hangers. My side is considerably shorter given the door swing and linen closet but I don't fill up the space I have so it's a great compromise.
Linen closet
I love to make a simple project really difficult and kind of excessive. My mind just wanders and wanders and I think about all the options and features you could possible put in a 2sqft closet. Let's see how that worked out.
Things needed to be a linen closet: shelves
Things I want in a linen closet: Built in, seamless, lighted shelves.
I had some forethought here. It wasn't much but I had a plan. I didn't want another light switch(there are already 40+ light switches in this house) so a jamb switch should work. I wanted to put in a normal light up top so I put in a normal ceiling box and ran a wire to another box that I put in above the door. I ran a wire through the door framing before drywall went up.
And then I built shelves. I picked up a 1x12 and some 1x2 sticks of lumber. Added the front edge to the 1x12, sanded, filled, sealed, sanded, painted, sanded, painted, sanded and finally cut to size then painted and sanded and painted the edges. I measured a bunch and secured more 1x2 to the walls to give a "complete" or "built in" look to the shelves. Before setting the shelves in place I cut strips of LED COB and soldered plugs onto them then stuck them to the underside of the shelves. I drilled holes through the shelf mounts and fished wire through the wall then added the receiving plugs.
Remember that box that I said I added above the door? Here it is. The outlet receives switched power from the jamb switch. The long white rectangle is an LED driver which is just an expensive 12v transformer. I installed a dimmer switch because we don't need the full output.
And here is the fun little jamb switch that I installed on the door frame. They have fancier versions of this but I wanted something as normal and replaceable as possible because I didn't want to remove the door to fix it when it fails.
The Results
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| this house came with carpet covered bricks...not sure why we still have them |
And here we are. A floorless, trimless, otherwise finished linen closet with 12sqft of shelf space all perfectly lit every time you open the door.
The finished(besides trim) closet makes so much sense and works so well we really can't imagine what it would have been like to use the old design.
I also replaced the bathroom door for a solid core door that swings inward which allowed me to replace the bedroom door with another solid core door that swings in a much more logical direction. We now have a mixture of white trim, wood trim, and no trim. It might sound a little impossible but the bathroom door trim was installed and then bedded in with drywall mud. I tried to fix this but I quickly realized the real fix was going to involve removing the drywall and exposing whatever "why is it like this" problem that caused them to make the decisions they made. So I did that and nearly as expected, I found a completely avoidable problem made by a very confusing set of decisions. And some day I will fix it and revisit the trim and paint finishings I've left on the to-do list of this project.
Just Getting Started
I've worked on most parts of this house in the short time we've been here. I thought I could fit more in this post but I'll save the other parts for later.
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