Primary Bedroom Closet Redo – Part 2: Painting & Removing Old Shelving

French Ethereal

2 years ago

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In Part 1 of our Primary Bedroom Closet Redo, I shared the wardrobe ideas I found at Lowe’s and at Ikea. I also shared the drawings I created for this closet refresh and some of the design ideas I thought about as I was drawing. Here in Part 2, I’m sharing painting in the closet and also getting the old shelving out.

Painting the closet ceiling actually went really quickly! It took longer to cut in around the ceiling and to get the A/C grate down than it took to paint. I spray painted the grate, too, since it had been painted the coffee color.

I was only going to paint the ceiling, which is why I left all my dresses in the closet and wrapped plastic tightly around everything. I quickly realized that if we were putting up wood shelves around the ceiling, I wouldn’t want to have to try and paint around them in the future.

I also painted with Hub’s dress shirts and casual shirts in the closet. I had one booboo and a small amount of paint dripped off the brush and onto a red fleece jacket sleeve. I quickly cleaned it off with this “recipe” below and you can’t tell that any paint got on the jacket at all.

Tip: If you get paint on clothing, spray it immediately with either 409 cleaner or Windex to bind the paint and keep it from soaking into the fabric’s fibers. I only had Windex and this worked well to clean most of the paint off. Rinse then use a pre-treater like Spray-N-Wash, spray the fabric on the side that had paint and on the opposite fabric side.

It was paint the whole closet now, or forget it, and live with a mismatched closet and bedroom. Soon, I was pulling all this ugly shelving down to be able to paint the walls easier. 🙂

This is what the closet looked like on my side put in by previous owners. These shelves are okay, but it drives me crazy to not be able to slide shirts, pants or other clothes when I am looking to find the perfect piece of clothing on any given day.

I really wanted what we had at our first two homes which were closet rods with no obstructions. I wanted our old closet back. Or some form of it. 😉

This is how the back wall of our PBR closet looked before the redo.

There was just a lot of unused space in this closet which could be better utilized, so Hubby and I talked about what height below the ceiling did we want these wood shelves? Were they going to wrap around the closet? You can see the laser level stuck in the wall there.

We decided on three shelves spanning around three of the walls. Each shelf had to be wide enough to hold at least three storage boxes each turned sideways. The wall shelf above the closet doors would be for holding very lightweight items only, so nothing would fall down on our heads if we had to be inside the closet for a weather event.

Hubby used the laser level to throw lines up so he could see where to hang the wooden supports along the walls. I ended up removing them as I painted each wall so I could paint behind.

Hanging the main shelving supports

Closetmaid still makes the type of wire shelving like we had in our California closets, so during that first research trip, I brought home most of the pieces needed to complete my side of the closet project. I knew that we still had some parts out in a storage box in the garage. Turns out they were the type I was just pulling out of the closet.

Thinking about selling all those leftover parts on Facebook Marketplace. 😉

Here is Hubby taking measurements and leveling this support. The original height he thought about putting the wood shelves at is marked with pencil lines. I left these unpainted so he wouldn’t have to remark the walls.

Once he was done installing the three undermount wood supports, I came back in and painted over those marks.

The toggle bolts used to screw the hanger pieces into the studs.

Lowe’s ~ Universal Wire Shelving, Model #071039

Here is a look at that shelving. I shared this to my Shopping board on Pinterest and it is linked to Lowe’s, in case you are looking for something easy to install in your closets (not sponsored).

The hanging rods come in 4′ or 8′ sections and thankfully they are easy to cut with a hacksaw.

The design for my closet side

Here is the original plan I drew for this side of the closet. What we ended up installing turned out pretty close to this design. I wasn’t sure if I’d have a shoe rack to the left along the door wall or underneath the long hanging clothing.

The beginnings of the new shelving 🙂

Once I hung up my long clothing, the current small rack had to come down. There wasn’t enough space for the clothes to hang.

When you plan out your closet remodel, plan on your clothing width to be about 20″ wide once everything is hung on hangers, measured from the wall to the front edge of the clothes.

The beauty of this type of closet system is that you have such flexibility to move your shelving around! I did find I needed to move a couple of these shelves around once I began hanging clothes, and that’s kinds normal.

To keep long clothes from dragging on the carpet, I raised the lower shelf (left side) here a few holes up. On the right side, I lowered the bottom shelf to let the shirts have more room for hanging.