Jason and I don’t have a ton of clothes. Being an Enneagram 5 I don’t pay as close attention to clothing as I could. When we started our journey of minimalism 7 years ago I tried for a capsule wardrobe, and while I have been less than diligent in my planning we are still very minimal in what we have. Our closet however was built for a couple who loves clothes. When we moved in the closet had several wire shelves in it along the ceiling. We put up some wire shelves we brought with us from our previous house and called it functional.

It was functional more of less even if it was poorly so and incredibly ugly. I hate to dish out money on something like a closet that will never be seen and is mostly forgotten - so the closet stayed this way. In the winter of 2019 and spring of 2020 however, I removed some of our upper kitchen cabinets. I can’t throw away something that is perfectly good, so I hatched a plan to make a mock-built-in style closet. After cleaning out the kids' toys and reducing, yet again, the amount of stuff in their rooms I had 2 Ikea Kallax cubby units I could repurpose for our project.

I drew up an initial design. It was the vision if-money-were-no-object plan. It had way more storage than we needed but seemed like it would be the most appealing option for resale. Like I have said before, in 2020 I decided to stop planning our house for when we would eventually sell it in 10-15 years and live in it right now. So armed with my leftover cubbies and cabinets I set to work to make a closet that functions for who we are as a family. It needed minimal storage for clothes, storage for books, and a reading area.

Once everything was in place the closet looked truly mismatched and perhaps worse than it had with the wire shelves. I needed to apply a unifying coat of paint on it to make everything look cohesive. I opted for chalk paint, after stripping and painting the full kitchen only a few weeks earlier I didn’t want to do all that again. I thought that chalk paint only required a thorough cleaning and an easy hand sanding, but I was wrong. I will eventually have to repaint it I think. For now, it works, because painting is my least favorite part of any project. So note to anyone reading this, stripping and sanding with enamel paint is the more durable option.