Out of the Closet

And lo, on the 1,675th day* there was, upon the land of the Hart Mansion, a new closet. And it was good.

Well, good-ish. You see, there's a small space in between the two downstairs restrooms. It's kind of like a hallway, but smaller. More of a passage. Or a wide spot between the walls. You take one or two steps into this "hallway" before turning left for the men's room or right for the ladies' room, but that's about it. Forgettable, in other words.

Which is fine, except that it's also fairly deep, with very high ceilings, and all that space is wasted. And we don't have a lot of space to waste in our 1890s-era kitchen. So Kathy had the bright idea of putting a storage closet in there. Nothing fancy; just something that could sit against the back wall and make it useful.

Trouble is, none of the standard home-store closets fit in the space. Of course. We would've been happy with generic knock-together storage units, but they were all either too wide to fit or so small that they wasted most of the space.

So we built our own out of the same type of white melamine-laminated particleboard that flat-packed ones use. So we've got that whole cheap Swedish look going.

It took a few days, but now we've got a custom-built cabinet that perfectly fits the space. It's secured directly to the walls, not free standing, so it's solidly in place. The sides, top, and shelves are melamine, and the kick space down by the floor encloses the heating vent we added last year.

The doors are pine with bead board inserts. I detailed the doors a bit using the router, just like the doors up in the third-floor bathroom. Some day, future inhabitants may remark on how nice it is that the doors all match. In reality, those are the only router bits I have, so yeah, they're all going to look pretty much the same.

*True. That's the number of days since we first moved in.