The closet is in the master bedroom, or, as it was when we bought it, the only bedroom. It has a light bulb with a cord pull that's too high for me to reach, and the only stainglass window in the house. The old owner left a very useful shoe rack for us, as well as a few hooks, an old but sturdy narrow shelf, and a long thin rod, but that was it for closet amenities. The room itself is large enough to walk into, so it's a good closet...just extremely filthy. I don't think the orangish-coral-pinkish walls had been painted in 30 or 40 years...In fact, I only saw 2 coats of paint total when I was smoothing down the walls during my prep work, and this house was built in 1914. Yuck.
It had to be painted. But before I could paint, I had to prep properly, since it's unlikely to get painted again for a long time...we don't really have another place for the contents to go, after all!
So...while all of our closet clothes and linens, literally several suitcases full, sat out in piles in our would-be dining room, and our dining table remained deconstructed and buried beneath and behind these piles, I set to work as rapidly as I could on this thing.
In order, I:
1. Had Daddy take out everything that could be unscrewed from the walls.
2. Washed everything, including the ceiling. Twice. With pine-sol, which I hate the smell of, but water-only wasn't going to cut through that grime.
3. Scraped and sanded everything. There were so many cracks and damaged wall spots...
4. Vacuumed up the mess, and wiped down the areas that were sanded.
5. Spackled over the cracks and crevices I'd enlarged with all that scraping.
6. Sanded the spackling smooth.
7. Vacuumed and wiped things up again.
8. Caulked cracks around the baseboard that couldn't be taken care of with spackling. I sealed up every nook and cranny I could find...no bugs (or worse) getting into MY clothes, thank-you-very-much!
9. Skipped primering...I just bought straight up high-gloss white primer-and-paint-in-one this time around, and painted the whole thing...But it still took 3 stinkin' coats. That was a very dark nasty color for a closet.
10. With Daddy's help, rehung the items that had been taken down.
11. Excitedly started to hang up all the clothes that had been laying around for waaaaay too long already. By itself this room had taken me almost a week, mainly because I didn't have as much time to devote to it daily.
12. Watched in utter dismay as the reinstalled, thin clothing rod bowed lower and lower, and I hadn't even finished hanging up MY clothes, let alone Daddy's.
13. Took yet another trip up to Lowes...it's the easiest one to get to...and got a new closet rod and brackets so it could have support in the center.
14. Had Daddy take down the old rod, and put up the new, thicker rod--which is made of two adjustable hollow tubes, and at its shortest is only slightly shorter than the span we needed, so it was doubled most of the way...which was a very good thing because we...
15. Discovered that the house had yet another irritating surprise for us: The shelf was too narrow for the brackets available for sale, and the rod is on an angle because of the window, meaning even if we *did* find the right brackets, they would only work in one spot.
16. Hung our clothes to see if we really needed to try to find different brackets. Thankfully, as it ended up, the rod by itself was enough. It was WAY stronger than the old one, and didn't need a central support.
So it took an entire week, during which the rest of the extremely-messy-from-the-move house languished, but the all-important closet got done, and the way was cleared for other things to start getting put away. At the risk of repeating myself over and over, it really does look sooo much better:
Before painting.
After painting...but before the new rod.
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