One Room Challenge – Week 5: Closet Conversion

This week in the One Room Challenge for Spring 2021, we are finishing up the linen closet conversion in our laundry room. If you are looking for our design plan and the weeks up until now, please visit the links below.

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5

Closet Conversion

We have a pretty substantial linen closet in our laundry room, the problem was we were not using it to it’s full potential. It was mainly a catch all for guest linens, blankets, and pool towels.

The door would swing out in the room and really took up a lot of space. Plus, you had to make sure the dryer door wasn’t open if you needed to get in there. My plan was to remove the door, like we did on the main entrance door to the laundry room, (this is now a sliding barn door – to be seen in the final reveal). Then take out the builder grade wire shelving and convert it into a laundry folding area with hanging rod and storage above. Plus some farmhouse style rolling laundry hampers in hopes that the kiddos can get their dirty clothes in the right bins for better laundry flow…that’s a thing, right?!

Steps

We removed the closet door, removed the wire shelving, then had to spackle and paint. We used the same color as the main room, Behr in “White”. It does have a hint of grey in it, but it’s “white”.

The two shelves are stained the Espresso, the same as the floating shelves in the main room. The plan is for a laundry folding/sorting shelf at counter height, 36″. After painting, we placed the cleats to hold a 33×22 plywood. We did have to add a cross brace to hold the board in the center to make it a bit stronger.

The second shelf we placed above the hanging rod, which we measured height with one of my husbands shirts so we could get an idea of how much clearance we needed.

I then stained both shelves, top shelf we actually layered 2 pieces of plywood together for strength, as I knew we would be storing items in baskets on that shelf. We finished off the shelf facings with 1/4in 1×3 sanded birch plywood on the top shelf, and a standard 1×2 on the lower shelf.

Laundry hampers are a DIY hack that will be in next weeks post, so make sure to come back to check that out. My inspiration for the laundry hamper was a Rae Dunn basket from Amazon, but I wasn’t ok with paying $60 for something dirty stinky boy clothes would be sitting in. Plus, I needed 2, and that was just over budget. We found these at our local AtHome store, for 29.99. Score!!

Final Pics

Here are some final photos of the closet conversion. I have already been using the folding center, and it really makes things more efficient than folding clothes on the bed!

 

Make sure to come back next week for my DIY Hacks, Projects, and Decor. The final week is so close and I can’t wait to show you the reveal…we are in love…with a laundry room.

For more inspiring spaces be sure to check out all the featured designers on the ORC blog, and many of the guest participants too!