more closet photos!

over thanksgiving weekend we took on the task of taming the bedroom closet. it had seemed like such a good idea, to have our contractor frame out the closets, and then leave us to build out the shelves. and in truth, it was, as his carpenters never would have had the finish carpentry skills to do what we wanted. but it also meant that it was six months before we had time to turn the closet from a heap of clothes into an actual closet. but, here it is, before, during, after:

sad closet heap:

walling off a window that mostly looks out into the light shaft and our neighbor’s back porch. we left the upper portion of the window exposed with the intention of putting a framed piece of stained glass in there later. in the morning, a few highly improbable* shafts of light actually bounce into through window , and i thought that a sparkly, colored window would be kind of fun.

eddie’s helping. she’s so helpful.

the cleanest, most pristine any closet will ever be in our lives.

sadly, our clothes are not the elegant, single-palette, carefully spaced garments of a Container Store advert. on the other hand, or lives are also not that boring.

we settled into a nice working groove on this project in terms of our respective skillsets, frustration threshold for learning new things, and tolerance for tediousness. i sketch the initial idea. then ben takes that sketch and re-engineers it into something that is actually feasible**. he does most of the heavy carpentry, and i do most of the finishing work. in theatre terms, since this is how i make sense of any project, i was designer and scenic artist, ben was technical director and carpenter.

also! a christmas miracle! out of nowhere, a city landscaping team rolled up this morning and stumped our tree, which basically means they used this crazy machine to pulverize the stump into sawdust in a matter of moments. this was long after i’d given up hope that they’d ever do it (we’ve had a stumping request on file with the city’s 311 system since mid-July). now we can plan a new tree in the spring. or maybe the city will surprise us and plant one for us. an easter miracle, perhaps?

*improbable, given the layout of the building. this window faces east, but faces another brick wall approximately 8 feet away.

** “bah, physics. so the wall is only 8′ and i designed a shelf system that’s 10′. what is the problem?”