Sometimes I get what I believe to be really great ideas with home improvement. I see kitchens and start dreaming about completely redoing ours, including layout, appliances, cabinets... Bathrooms, I being to imagine new vanities, new paint, new tile... I can get kind of carried away - and of course think we should do everything right now. John usually just shakes his head.
This time I managed to get him on board with my latest project.... master bedroom closet overhaul!!! I don't know what prompted it, but I suddenly got extremely fed up with our closet and asked for a new one. Ours is pretty inefficient, and I also have a problem with owning a lot of stuff... so it just wasn't working.
We started it thinking we could get the demolition and painting done on Saturday, buy the new system, and ultimately install on Sunday. Sounds like an easy project, right? We so should have known better. John had to work on Saturday so that left me with the demolition. It was tough. Just getting everything OUT of the closet took longer than I expected. Then the "geniuses" that put up the closet (essentially a shelf with a rod - not too tough) decided they were really nervous about it falling, so they had screwed, nailed, and glued the shelf supports to the drywall. It took some serious muscle to get that thing down (which I apparently don't have and required help).
The long and short of it - it took us the weekend to just get the closet ready for install. We had a lot of patching to do, holes to fill, priming to do. We finally got our closet painted by the end of Sunday. We lived out of our living room for the entire week before being able to install our new closet. It wasn't pretty. Our condo is still recovering -- I think it will be a slow process. But, our closet looks great, and we are pretty excited to have done it all by ourselves (alright - Pat came down and helped a little with the demo, and we couldn't have done it without some of the tools he brought down)... but overall we did a good job, and it looks great! I'm excited because there is just so much more space, and I'm hoping we can get rid of our IKEA dresser still in our room. Oh, and we even managed to squeeze in a little electrical work! We had broken the light in the closet, so we bought a new one and installed it ourselves... well, John did.. after a little trepidation about touching wires even though we knew the circuit was off.
We had a couple of mishaps along the way: measuring (note to self, always always always check to make sure that you measure where you really need measuring and don't assume a room is square - thank goodness it was an easy fix), top rails being put on upside down (another easy fix), but in the end we still managed to get it up... and 4 days later it's still on the wall! I'm pretty psyched.
So - below is a quick little slideshow to show what we did (hopefully it works, for some reason I have serious problems with this).
Now on to the next project....
This time I managed to get him on board with my latest project.... master bedroom closet overhaul!!! I don't know what prompted it, but I suddenly got extremely fed up with our closet and asked for a new one. Ours is pretty inefficient, and I also have a problem with owning a lot of stuff... so it just wasn't working.
We started it thinking we could get the demolition and painting done on Saturday, buy the new system, and ultimately install on Sunday. Sounds like an easy project, right? We so should have known better. John had to work on Saturday so that left me with the demolition. It was tough. Just getting everything OUT of the closet took longer than I expected. Then the "geniuses" that put up the closet (essentially a shelf with a rod - not too tough) decided they were really nervous about it falling, so they had screwed, nailed, and glued the shelf supports to the drywall. It took some serious muscle to get that thing down (which I apparently don't have and required help).
The long and short of it - it took us the weekend to just get the closet ready for install. We had a lot of patching to do, holes to fill, priming to do. We finally got our closet painted by the end of Sunday. We lived out of our living room for the entire week before being able to install our new closet. It wasn't pretty. Our condo is still recovering -- I think it will be a slow process. But, our closet looks great, and we are pretty excited to have done it all by ourselves (alright - Pat came down and helped a little with the demo, and we couldn't have done it without some of the tools he brought down)... but overall we did a good job, and it looks great! I'm excited because there is just so much more space, and I'm hoping we can get rid of our IKEA dresser still in our room. Oh, and we even managed to squeeze in a little electrical work! We had broken the light in the closet, so we bought a new one and installed it ourselves... well, John did.. after a little trepidation about touching wires even though we knew the circuit was off.
We had a couple of mishaps along the way: measuring (note to self, always always always check to make sure that you measure where you really need measuring and don't assume a room is square - thank goodness it was an easy fix), top rails being put on upside down (another easy fix), but in the end we still managed to get it up... and 4 days later it's still on the wall! I'm pretty psyched.
So - below is a quick little slideshow to show what we did (hopefully it works, for some reason I have serious problems with this).
Now on to the next project....
