Closet reno: the before

I mentioned on Friday that I was going to tackle my closet redo over the weekend.  I would have posted sooner, but my stone-age digital camera ran out of batteries Sunday night, and I couldn't finish taking photos (yes, you heard right.  The batteries died.  The camera is that old that it still uses batteries).

Anyways, the outdated layout was sooo not efficient, and needed a serious make over.  The closets on my 1940s home are actually quite large for the era, but clearly space maximization was not a priority during WW2 - which, I'm pretty sure, was the last time anyone paid ANY attention to this space.  Weird, I know.

So here's the before:

We have one loooong bar and one corresponding looong shelf.  But look at all that height, that empty, barely utilized height!

The one redeeming factor about my closet is that it did have some extra shelving.  But the hanging clothes stuck out so far into the space, I could only see half of the shelves.  I basically forgot what I owned if it was folded on the left hand side.

Here's the other side of the closet.  The bar goes on for miles!  How am I supposed to know what's going on down there??  The clothes could be running amock under my very nose, getting all wrinkled and dishelved!

See?  I had hardly fit down there!  I've been living with this closet since we moved in August, and I had just about had it.  For a girl that loves clothes as much as I do, this chaos could not go on any further.

But before the demo and construction could begin, I had to go through the arduous task of moving all the clothes out.  Not easy when you love clothes.  Everything went up to the guest room.  Remember what it used to look like?

Well now it looks like this....

Bags were everywhere!

I actually ran out of bed space, so sweaters ended up on the floor...(gross I know, but I managed to overcome it).

Ooh!  Look what I found in the process!

It was a disaster.  Stuff consumed the room, absolute chaos.  Good thing we didn't have any guests in town.

But then the construction began.

It was slow at first.  We had to patch unnecessary holes in the wall (I'm a master spackler), remove the loooong bar, and corresponding looong shelf.  Then we had to tear down the shelving on the right hand side.  Riley was such a help.

From this photo, you can also see the former home owners had a bit of water damage that they fixed, but never really cleaned up.  So we did some sanding, more spackling, and painted the whole closet white.

Riley was an excellent fore-dog.  She supervised the whole process...and proceeded to eat all the cardboard packaging in sight.  Here the Hubby is starting to install the shelves!  The closet is almost done!

Tomorrow I will let you know how it all turned out!