Anyone who lives in Philadelphia is familiar with the closet situation here - most of the houses are 100+ years old and either don't have closets or have teeny tiny shallow closets that aren't actually deep enough to hang anything in. I've ended up installing shelves in my shallow closets to create a workspace or shoe shelves in these shallow closets, but needed something that would actually fit hangers!
When renovating this bedroom, I wanted to find a way to make myself a "walk-in closet" while still making sure it was functionally a bedroom - this is my first house and I don't know how long we'll be here, so for future renting or resale purposes I needed to find a way to create closetspace but also create a layout that would work for a bedroom.
It took lots and lots of planning - on paper, with masking tape on the floor, and finally I decided on a layout with Ikea Pax Wardrobes by utilizing the corner away from the window. The little nook around the window is a few inches larger than the average full size mattress - making it the perfect place for a bed!
I started out by assembling the frames and screwing them together - I actually asked for extra of the included screws for combining frames so that we could make sure that the frames were really secure.
Once the frames were in place, we added the doors. Because our house is so old (our floors aren't level in all spots and the plaster walls aren't always plumb) we needed to do some adjusting with the doors until they fit correctly.
Because we have 9' ceilings, even the tallest Pax frames left about 14" of unused space. I wanted to make this project look "built-in", so using hardwood boards we built a frame around both sides of the wardrobe in order to close any gaps from the back of the wardrobe to the walls (plaster walls aren't often plumb so we had to custom cut these pieces for a snug fit). Then we built boxes to make open shelving, and nailed them into the top of the wardrobe.
I used the same Valspar Ultra White semigloss paint (the color I use for all of the trim in my house) on the entire wardrobe so that it would match the trim and feel more like a part of the room instead of a piece of furniture.
To finish the "built-in" look we added crown molding to the top and redid the baseboards so that they run along the bottom of the wardrobe and back to the walls seamlessly. We were originally planning on making the crown molding so that it touched the ceiling but ended up liking the little space between the molding and the ceiling - it leaves a soft shadow that really highlights the height of the wardrobe.
I was really inspired by a renovation using Ikea cabinetry with doorknockers as handles - it ended up taking me a long time to find brass doorknockers big enough for the doors (and then they ended up being backordered for several weeks) but I was so happy that I waited - they're so sturdy that they really make the wardrobe seem like a solid, built-in piece.
