So Much Work for Something Nobody Will See

I forgot to take photos of our Master Bedroom closet before Art started working on the shelves. (Just in case anybody is wondering, one white laundry basket is for lights, the other for darks. The blue is for everyday stuff that I let my mom wash. We won't give her clothes that would look funny with a U at the bottom from hanging on the clothes line. I could do a whole post on mom and her laundry obsession routine.)

It was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. We bought 2 higher grade 4' X 8' plywood sheets thinking at the time that it would be nice to have the shelves show off its natural color.

It was then I realized that I would need to sand, varnish, sand, varnish, sand and varnish again each shelf, top and bottom. I also had to repaint the interior of the closet since it got dinged as the shelves were being fitted. It was easier to do the sealing of the shelves than the kitchen door since I could use a water based polyurethane. I also had to use an iron to seal the front of the plywood with a wood veneer strip.


However, I love the shelves now that it's done... in the master bedroom. It feels smoooooth and lovely touching the shelves and I almost don't want to put anything on it... almost.


Art is now concentrating on this little closet in my office and it's requiring a WHOLE lot more effort. The opening is non-standard so it required quite a bit of hunting around to find doors that would work. We found them at Home Depot as part of a build your own cabinet project. It'll be much prettier than the shower curtain I was using to cover the hole.


Then it took a lot of measuring, fitting, remeasuring, refitting, and redoing the calculations before we could get started again.


We did a test run to see if the shelves would fit.


Then I had to repaint the whole closet and the supports that Art hammered in because the walls had gotten dinged up just like the other closet during all the "test runs."


Then I had to sand down the edges of the plywood sheets.


We bought these veneer strips to cover the front edge of the shelving.


I had Art demonstrate how I used the iron to glue on the strips while he followed with a block of wood to firm it in.


Then came the sanding and varnishing and sanding and varnishing....


The moulding for the closet had to be painted white. Ummm... Art just groaned that I painted over all his markings on the moulding. Oopsie! Maybe I'll go offer to make him a smoothie.

You know... once it's all done, nobody is going to see all this hard work. Maybe I should keep all the closet doors open?

Uh oh! I'm hearing more groans coming from the closet. I'll post a photo eventually when it's all done.