Last night, I was standing at the sink in the hallway bathroom (turning on the faucet for my cat to drink water, which she demands about five times a day 🤣 ), and as I turned to leave the room, I just stopped and stared at my almost-finished walk-in closet. Honestly, I never dreamed that I’d have a closet like that, and to see it in its almost-finished state, with just a couple of projects left before I can actually call it finished, and to see how much that room reflects me — my love of flowers, my love of bold wallpaper, my love of color, and filled with my clothes, shoes, handbags, and jewelry — I suddenly became so thankful for all of the delays, all of the wrestling with floor plans, and even the setback and disappointment of our ruined home gym hardwood floor that led to our change of plans for our house.
I started to think back about our original plans for the house and the original addition we had planned to build onto the back of our house. That addition would have included a brand-new master bedroom, family room, and laundry room. But what about the closet? I didn’t really have room for an actual closet, so my original plan was to add IKEA wardrobes along one wall of the bedroom.
I mean, that’s it. In that new addition, that would have been my closet — about 15 feet of IKEA Pax wardrobes lined up on one wall. Looking at what I have now, and what I had originally planned, I can’t imagine this being my closet.
I eventually realized that it wasn’t a good idea to build a brand-new addition and not include an actual closet for the bedroom, so I tried to fit one in. But the only thing I could come up with was something like this, which would have resulted in two different closets, one smaller and one much larger, that were about seven feet wide and created a kind of hallway leading from the bedroom into the bathroom.
It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t love it. And I especially didn’t like the idea of having two separate closets. Presumably, I would use one for shoes, handbags, and other accessories, and the bigger one for clothes.
I even tried this strange idea of building a closet off to the side, but it still would have been only seven feet wide.
When our home gym flooring disaster struck, I remember feeling so defeated. My attitude was horrible for a while, and I knew that my plans and dreams for our addition would be pushed back yet again. And then, in frustration and defeat, I decided that we needed to just change our plans so that we could have a proper bedroom sooner than later. And that’s when we decided to turn what was our home gym into our bedroom. The disappointment didn’t last long. It was pretty quickly replaced with excitement, but then I had to figure out the closet situation again. And that’s when I decided to turn the guest bedroom into a closet. But originally, I had planned on it being a home gym/closet combination.
And even after I decided to make it a laundry room/closet combination instead, I went through months of frustrating planning, changing of plans, etc. I had originally planned on using half of the room as a laundry room and the other half as a closet.
And then at some point, I changed the way I wanted the room divided, and planned to put up a wall with a door to separate the front part of the room, which would be the closet, from the back part of the room, which would be the laundry room.
But what I have ended up with is the absolute perfect plan for us, even though it originally felt like defeat and compromise. It took so long to get here, and it took a lot of planning, tweaking, changing plans, getting input from others, and finally, jumping in with both feet to make my vision come to life. The process wasn’t always fun, and it was filled with disappointments along the way, and at times, I thought I was being forced to abandon my dreams and plans. But last night, as I stood there looking at my closet/laundry room combo and thinking about the years-long journey that brought me to this moment of having what is truly a dream closet for me, I became so thankful for that journey, filled with delays, disappointments, and frustrations. Things worked out perfectly, and much better than I had originally planned.
With that said, I have high hopes that I’ll have a finished chandelier to share with y’all tomorrow. I ended up putting my clay flowers in the oven last night for about an hour last night before I went to bed. I turned the oven off before I went to sleep, but kept them in there all night, and then turned it back on this morning. It seems to be working to dry the flowers faster, so I feel pretty confident that I’ll be able to get the last of the flowers primed and painted today, and get the chandelier finished. And then I’ll have one more project left — framing out the doorway to the closet.
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Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
