The Closet

My step-dad is a fearless man when it comes to projects around the house. His lack of knowledge has never stopped him from diving into a diy disaster. The best example happened when I was about twelve or so. We lived in a smallish house that had a den and on the other side of one wall, there was a living room. Both rooms were too small and of course the living room never got used for anything. It basically just stored furniture.

My Mom decided to leave one weekend to visit my Uncle George in Dallas. That night, I was sitting on the couch with my brother and sister watching TV when my Dad appears before us. "Get up and help me move the couch" he says. We move the couch away from the wall and then he tells my brother "Go get my hammer." None of us had any idea what he was thinking, but when he swung that hammer into the dry wall, my siblings and I didn't ask why. All we thought was "Hell yeah! Destruction! Mayhem! Anarchy!" We trashed the wall down to studs and wire in just a few minutes, hauled away the debris and then moved the furniture back to where it was.

Mom came home and the first thing she sees, or doesn't see, when she walks through the door is the half destroyed wall. I don't remember any arguments or anything, but Mom never left Dad alone in the house again. It turned out that the wall was load bearing and Dad couldn't figure out how to remove the frame without the house falling in on us. Eventually, a neighbor that was a home builder came over and helped him out. So now we had one big room where there used to be two small ones, but the parents couldn't afford new carpet for almost a year, leaving the room with green shag on one side and orange shag on the other (it was the early 80's).

Why do I bring this up? Kitten and I had two small closets off of the master bedroom. One was a linen closet and behind it was a walk in closet with a pocket door. It looked liked this.The wall at the front of the picture had some bead board crap on it that I pulled off to find the remnants of wall paper. To the right is the linen closet and through the door way(which had a pocket door in the wall) was the walk in closet that had cedar on the back and front of it with a light fixture over the door way. It sort of came up in discussion that we would be better off with one big open closet and we could put wardrobes in it. I was dubious, but the conversation kept coming back to how nice it would be, so in the end I committed to it.

First I climbed into the attic to make sure nothing important was being supported by the wall. I wasn't gonna make the same mistake my Dad made! I then ripped out the linen closet and tore down the wall.I cleared all of the cedar out. Eliminated a light switch, removed a light in the linen closet and then wired the switch on the wall in the bedroom to the new junction box I put in over head. The jack wagon that put up the cedar not only nailed it to the wall, but also GLUED it! It pulled off a lot of the paper on the dry wall, so I had to put a skim coat of joint compound on all of the walls. I then scraped the popcorn off of the ceiling and painted it, put in a new light fixture and painted the rest of the room. This is where we are now.
I still have to trim it out and I am going to put laminate down from the bedroom into the closet, but I think it turned out OK. For a closet.