A friend of mine was picking my brain earlier this week about how she could add more storage to her home. Closets and storage solutions make such huge difference in the quality of life in a home and it’s not always something we think about when looking at a home. While that’s all true, sometimes traditional closets aren’t the most functional answer for the space. The room that we’re turning into the girls’ room has a wall of double closets and we’re tearing them out–Eek!
The truth is, although these look like two separate closets, they are actually one big space inside, meaning there’s a lot of dead space in the middle where the wall appears to be and there’s no real organizational features inside either–just some rods with shelves positioned below them in a way that you couldn’t really hang anything on one of the rods anyway.
We decided to demo it all out and come up with a plan that fit the 9×12 room better and functioned for our girls, too. That’s how we landed on two built-in IKEA Pax Wardrobes, one for each of them.
Did you know, like their kitchen planner, IKEA has a wardrobe planner, too? This was our first time using it and you can customize every inch of their Pax wardrobes. Although we could have made each of them unique (If it were for Chris and me, one might include a tie rack for him, or a longer rod zone to hold dresses for me) in the end, Greta and Faye’s clothing storage needs are pretty similar, so we ended up making the two wardrobes identical.
You can see how we laid them out in the above photo. Both wardrobes will have sleek, black doors (we went with the UNREAL door–see below), but I left the one on the right “open” so you could take a peek inside. We decided on a 39″ wide wardrobe and put a divider in the bottom half so they could have a lot of smaller drawers as opposed to a few wider drawers–although we included one big drawer above the divider, too. I’ve noticed with the girls clothes, they have so many categories, especially since we don’t hang many of their clothes besides dresses–long sleeved tees, sweaters, short sleeves, pajamas, leggings, pants, underwear, tights and socks–that all those smaller drawers will come in handy for. We put two wire baskets at the bottom for shoes, one hanging rod and a shelf at the top for out-of-season storage.
Separating their closets also allowed us about 30″ in the middle to hang a mirror atop this wallpaper in the center with this double sconce above. And maybe this sweet stool for reaching dresses or sitting down to put on shoes (bonus: doubles as a stage in front of the mirror, haha!).
We went to IKEA with a plan, but we made so many tweaks and changes after we were in the store and we could poke around all their wardrobe examples and door options. We took time to study a lot of their samples–I couldn’t believe all the combinations–and landed on a mix that would suit our girls best. Luckily they had computers that we could use there to design our final wardrobes and then print out our shopping list. Unlike IKEA kitchens, the wardrobes you actually pull the pieces for yourselves in the warehouse.
I’ll break down the cost and more details on how we’re building them in once we get everything demo’d and then installed–which we’ll tackle as soon as we get the reading nook framed in.
Would you ever tear out a closet in favor of something like this?
The new closet solution will look SO much better! I really think the big home builders need to add more women to their staff! :)
I am obsessed with this idea and can’t wait to do it to all three of my kids rooms! We just moved into a house with the ultimate in closet wasted space. I can’t sleep just thinking about it!
I’m thinking about doing these for our living room that we never used and convinced my husband to do custom built ins for a fancy mudroom/multiple purpose room. They look so high end and will probably be cheaper than the custom woodwork quote!
I tore out the exact same closet set-up in my son’s bedroom, and divided the space into 2 closets and built a custom media cabinet in the middle, it is a major functional improvement but I still have to do trim work and hang doors, so not pretty quite yet…
My youngest son’s room is, in the real estate world in our particular region, counted as a bedroom. Because it has a “closet”. Which is a joke because the “closet” also houses the door to our walk up attic. Needless to say, when you open the attic door, it consumes all the space inside the “closet”. We have PAX in his room. Best decision I think we could have come up with. Didn’t want to spend a fortune for a custom built in and we will probably convert his room to an office one day anyway. No issue with basket drawers ;). We purchased a nifty hanging bar just for corner spaces. That will allow us a little bit more hanging space. Just need to cut it to size and install.