Blogmas Day 10

Back in early July, we reached the all important done-but-not-finished stage with the guestroom/Brie's office/Craft room as seen below.

Since then we've mostly use this space for guests (big win) and also for overflow storage while shifting ballast from room to room during other projects. Other than the addition of some end tables, it was in a pause. Circling back to this space, Brie used the back half of December to tackle the closet, which she had always intended to have a built in table and work space.

In the breezeway that connects the house to The Room, the previous owners had installed a coat closet of sorts, though it oddly jutted into The Room, cus why have anything make spatial sense? What is life?

You can see the platform for this closet and the doors that opened to the breezeway in the above picture. The doors, like all doors in the house, were the shittiest of hollow core doors (Here's a decent explainer on hollow core vs solid core vs solid wood doors). Brie set aside these folding doors back in October and over the holidays morphed them into usable tables/shelves. I only have pictures for the shelves, but just know that this was all also done for a full door which was made into a table insert (shown at the end).

As you can see in these two shots, the doors have a solid wood trim piece on all sides with veneer glued onto it. The plan was to attach fresh 1x3 posts to the interior of the closet like a railing, 'cut open' the hollow folding doors, revealing the open channels inside, then slot the hollow 'shelf' onto these fixed railings like a floating shelf.

This is a rough approximation of the shelf attachment

Most of the work was cutting down the hollow doors to the correct size for shelves, and then sanding the hell out of them b/c the wood veneers, especially on older, water affected doors, can be razor sharp.

Because the table would need to hold far more weight, Brie set the door on top a sturdy fixed bracket running along all 3 sides of the closet rather than recreate the floating shelf. Final sanding and painting is still to come, but it's now a functional workspace for Brie or any guest.

-S.