A Tale of Two Closets

Welcome back to closet week here on the blog!

Monday and Tuesday I showed you AJ’s hardwoods and his newly installed Elfa closet. That’s what happens when you do all the prepping right… now let me tell you about what happens when you don’t.

First, I have been drooling over Elfa and The Container Store since they invited me (and every other high school senior in Dallas) to their college prep sale where they show you all the cool space-saving dorm room things to buy. BRILLIANT retail marketing by the way… I definitely tried to talk my mom into buying EVERYTHING that I ABSOLUTELY NEEDED for my dorm room. True story… I’m the girl that wanted to go to debate camp after my brother got to buy all these awesome new school supplies that were organized into a fabulous file box. Yep… NERD alert. Anyway… needless to say, I love all fancily organized things… so I can get lost in The Container Store for hours.

If you have seen my 30 Before 30 list you know that the husband and I had planned on building some built-ins for the master closet to make it more efficient. I thought that we had done a pretty good job of using our space, but knew that it could use some sprucing up with some drawers and different shelving options.

But when my about to be sister-in-law got a friends and family coupon for Elfa we jumped at the chance. We thought about it and weighed our options: Elfa is more expensive but would be installed right away, I wouldn’t learn from the experience of building my own closet… but I wouldn’t make the mistakes either and although I like learning through my mistakes it felt like maybe I should try building other cabinets and drawers first before I jump into a huge project like this without any experience. With all of that decided we took our measurements to The Container Store and let her design our closet based off of answering a few questions. If you are going to go have them design one for you, here are the things I would know before you go:

All the measurements: height, depth, width
Where the doors are and what kind they are (bifold, sliding, etc)
How much space you need for different things: long hanging, short hanging, drawers, number of shoes, etc.

Once we did that, we put in our order (we actually did two closets at the same time, but the other closet isn’t even close to being put back together… so I’ll show you guys it later) and we arranged a pick up time, an installation time and paid for our Elfa. Since we had only two racks and two rods on each wall, we decided to let them do the demo. The installation guy would tear it down, patch and paint the wall all at the same time and that he brings with him flat white paint, so if it is something different than that, we need to provide it.

And here is where warning bells should have gone off in my head, but instead I thought… great! our closet is white, that will be perfect. So we cleaned out our closet and got set for our installation date last Friday. Our closet looked nice and empty…

The living room… not so much.

The husband has Fridays off, so he texted me photos while I was at work. It was going great… except for one problem. Can you see it?

AHHH of course you can see it!! Our closet is glaringly and obviously very NOT true white. (you’d think I’d have noticed that…) Aaaaannd we didn’t have any paint that matched the closet. But since the guy was there and already doing the install we just had to go with it. But I was totally kicking myself for not having done the demo ourselves and painting the closet when it was totally empty.

So that meant the husband and I needed to paint the closet AFTER the Elfa was installed. I know the white paint is crazy distracting, but look how great the Elfa looks! And the great news about Elfa is that it was really easy to take the shelves and drawers down to be able to paint. I mean don’t get me wrong… painting around all those bars and the top hanging rack definitely made painting 2-3 times harder and NOT how I was picturing spending my Friday night. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

So we made a quick run to Home Depot and picked out a light gray color. Its Behr’s French Silver mixed at 50% intensity. And this is what I was picturing when I pictured the Elfa in my head. It just took a few hours of late night painting to get there!