Just another day in the lives of...: July 2010

After 2 weekends of installing our new closet system and 2 extra trips to Ikea, I can finally say we're finished! After a ton of research, we decided to use the Pax system from Ikea. We talked about hiring a professional closet company, but ultimately decided we didn't want to invest that much into a house we hope not to be in forever. The Pax system is fully customizable and had everything we were looking for at the right price point.

Now that it's installed, I'll tell you my opinion. Putting the pieces together was easy and went very quickly. The instructions (pictures!) were easy to understand and didn't involve that many steps. The hard part was figuring out how to get 8' high frames into that closet niche. Once we figured out how to get them in, the other two went in fast. You'll notice we left the back off the middle section- this was the only way we could figure out how to get all three pieces in there. Franz literally pulled the middle section in as close to the wall as he could get it, sandwiching him in during the process, and then stepped through the frame and pushed it from the front side into its final place. All the shelves, drawers, and rods get installed after the frames are bolted/secured to the wall.

Franz does not like home improvement projects, I on the other hand live for them! He was very accommodating and helped do all the heavy lifting, while I took on the easier task of putting the pieces together. We are not the most "handy" couple when it comes to household projects, but we are really proud that we were able to take on a project of this scale all by ourselves. If we can do it, you can too! It helped to have a power drill/screwdriver and level. We also used a plain old screwdriver as well. I like that Ikea keeps this in mind when they are designing their furniture- not everyone has a garage full of fancy tools.

Here are some Before/After photos and a sneak peak of the new paint color.

Before:

After:

My shoe drawer:

I should point out some of the challenges we faced. Our house is 3 bedrooms. Temporarily, the master bedroom will have to serve quite a few functions- a place to sleep, a place to store a majority of our clothes, hopefully incorporate a small sewing niche, and house our printer/modem/router- all of this in a 9' x 12' space. Currently we store a lot of our clothes in a large 8 drawer dresser on the other side of the room. That dresser will get moved out of the room across the hall and will be used in the baby's room. Which means all of those clothes will now have to be stored in the new closet- as you can tell with all the drawers we added. Later on, we are hoping that the girls will share a room which will free up Avery's current bedroom. We can then use that space as a sewing room, office, etc. room and move our dresser back into the master bedroom. Then if we want, we can remove some of the drawers in the closet and add more hanging rods.

Now I already know the next question you all are going to have- "where are all of your clothes? All those clothes looks like mens clothes." Yep, you're right, although if you look closely you'll see a few things in there that belong to me. Let's just say that for the past two years, I've lived in t-shirts and jeans. I've either been raising a newborn, chasing a toddler around at the park, or I've been pregnant. Not the most glamorous/stylish jobs in the world. In fact, I've started to feel a little frumpy, so one day I decided to get rid of all my pre-pregnancy clothes and only keep what I am currently wearing. I've told Franz that after I have this baby, I deserve a brand new wardrobe and want to start dressing a little nicer again. He's totally on board with this :) And when that time comes, I will fill up "my side" of the closet with things I love. Until then, I really don't care.

Oh yeah, I also ordered some of these:

Supposedly they take up less space than normal hangers and allow your pants to hang closer to the rod. Right now Franz's pants are touching his shoes. If these work, I'll be ordering another box for myself :)

What about closet doors? Right now we are totally enjoying having the whole closet accessible for both of us at the same time. With our old closet, it was really annoying to have to move those large doors to one side or the other to get to our clothes. It also made the room feel really small (smaller than it already is!) and dark. I think for now we are going to leave the space open- I plan on adding a full length mirror and some coat hooks on either side as well. It kind of feels like a mini dressing niche the way it is. Once we get our bed moved in there, we'll see if we still like the openness of the closet or if we want to explore some options to close it off.

Up next: a DIY upholstered headboard. I'm really excited about this project!

The past two weekends have been full of "house projects", as my husband calls them. He's not fond of "house projects", and installing the closet system was not easy or fun- especially since I am practically no help at 5 months pregnant. I hope to have pictures of that soon, I have to exchange out a few shelves for a few more drawers and add another clothes rod. It's 90% finished and I have to say it is so wonderful to finally have a closet that utilizes all the space. The room also has a brand new paint color we're loving and the carpet guy came to patch the seam where the old closet track used to be.

Amongst all the craziness that's been going on in that room with the closet, I've also been trying to do some sewing. I had an order I was working on for another bride, and I figured while I was making her wristlets, I might as well make up a bunch of zippered pouches at the same time.