My Most Boring Project Is Finished! (Studio Storage Closet)

So let me remind you what this closet looked like before…

And now, after some paint, trim, and a piece of plywood to hide the HVAC unit, it looks like this…

In a perfect world, I’d have built-in shelves in here that utilize every spare inch of space. But since this isn’t a perfect situation, and I have to be able to easily move the shelves out of the way if the HVAC unit needs service, I had to stick with these shelving units on casters.

I was able to fit two of them in here. I’m not exactly sure yet what I’ll be storing in here. I still need to organize the whole studio, and for now, I think I’ll have more than enough storage space. So this might be space I’ll grow into as I begin to actually use the studio.

Since I didn’t want to have a plain green wall, I decided to hang one of my acrylic art prints here to add a little bit of color and interest to an otherwise very boring space. I love opening the closet door and seeing that colorful print.

I had initially planned to add some shelves to the area to the right, but since I haven’t even filled the shelves I have, I decided to hold off on that for now.

It was a pain having to work around this mass of air ducts, so I did the best I could. It’s still not pretty, but at least I no longer have to look at the ugly side of an HVAC unit. Adding this piece of plywood here, and notching out the area for the ducts, made a big eyesore a bit more tolerable.

And now, you have to go into the closet and peek around the plywood to see the ugly HVAC unit.

I had planned to leave it as it was when I showed you my progress last week. It looked like this…

But that’s another thing my brain wouldn’t let me leave alone. I ended up covering the plywood box with a nicer piece of sanded plywood, adding some trim, and painting it to match.

I also ended up doing the door casing the same as the other doors.

I didn’t do this because I just couldn’t help myself. I actually planned to do a much simpler trim on the closet side of the door, but as it turned out, I didn’t have the lumber on hand to do a simpler trim. I did happen to have what I needed to do this style in my scrap pile, though, so I went with it. It’s not the highest quality lumber. It had gotten rained on and was warped, so I put it through the planer a couple of times to make it look better. It’s fine for the inside of a storage closet, but I wouldn’t have used it in a prominent place in the house.

And then I did a quick and easy frame around the wall vent.

I really wanted to just leave it undone, but that’s just not me. I’m okay with imperfection and not using the highest quality materials inside a closet, but as it turns out, I’m not okay with leaving projects completely undone in a closet. Here’s what it looked like before…

And here it is now. I used lumber from my scrap pile for this, too. I wanted things to look finished in here, but I wanted to spend as little money as possible.

This is the area where I had originally planned to put up some shelves, but I changed my mind since I have more than enough shelves for now. And I may find that I need hooks to hang things instead of needing more shelves, so this is a great area for that. But for now, I don’t need any additional storage.