Surprise Demolition

For Christmas, my very thoughtful mother bought my sister and me sewing kits. You wouldn’t think such an innocent gift would end up costing me thousands of bucks, but…

I took my kit home to the craft room and attempted to put it in a closet, but I was kinda out of room. So I removed all the towels and sheets and art supplies and prepared to reorganize. But before I could get started, the sheer ugliness of my bare closets caught me by surprise.

I mean, this displays a pretty consistent inability to use a measuring tape. I may be math challenged when compared to my brilliant parents, but I can’t have people thinking that a) I made this closet, and b) I can’t add.

An hour or two later, I had grabbed a drill, a hammer and a crowbar and was pulling the closets down.

But before we get to those pictures, here’s a reminder of what the closets used to look like. There’s a whole wall of the mis-measured, crooked things. I had removed their doors and covered the uneven moldings with curtains.

Blah. You know what would be better than pretending they’re not ugly? Ripping them out! And reclaiming some of the space they’ve stolen.

I have a similar plan for the bedroom closets: take them out, refinish the walls behind them, and insert modular IKEA wardrobes. I think this is a better use for the space because all of these built-in closets are narrow and deep, so they take up more floor space than is practical in my tiny bedrooms. And things tend to get lost in the backs of them, since you have to stack everything in front and back piles.

Now, of course, since I’m taking the closets out I’ll also need to take the laminate floors out (they’re incomplete where the closet walls touched the floor). And if I’m removing them in this room, I might as well do it in the office too. So I’ll get my upstairs floors refinished like I did on the first floor. Then I’ll probably want to tile the bathroom. Then…