Old houses have closets!

Is it possible to only have one project going at a time? Around Isthmus House, the answer would be, unequivocally, no. No, it's not.

It's not that I have a short attention span or that I'm impatient or even that I'm in a rush. I think I continue to work on multiple projects at once because it allows me to see little bits of progress all over my house.

While the upstairs bathroom is in progress, there's been no exception to the rule: multiple projects continue.

Old homes aren't exactly known for their storage capabilities and the House on the Isthmus is no exception there either. When I moved upstairs and into what was once the upstairs living room, there was no closet. Heck, there was no wall between the "living room" and the "kitchen" so really a closet would have been a bit too big a dream at that point.

With Isthmus House moving firmly back to being a single family home, however, it was time to add some storage.

To get started, I needed to figure out where I could even put openings for doors without massive amounts of demo. There were lots and lots of measurements and lots and lots of tape involved.

Hint: this isn't exactly where this door ended up

Eventually, though, I was able to fit in a doorway - taped out, of course, and make the closets decent sized. For my old room, the only way to add a closet was to take away from the nook in the master.

As you can see, that meant closing off the master closet (pantry?) door (that's the door on the left in the photo). That's a story for another day. Trust me, it deserves its own post.

To do that, we removed the door, casings and jambs from the opening before adding 2x4s for screwing in the drywall.

After finishing that bit of framing, we demo'd part of the archway turned wall for the opening into the closet from the bedroom.

The framing here is left over from when we initially installed drywall to separate the living room from the kitchen

 Once it was fully opened, we were able to build the back wall of the closet.

The framing went up pretty quickly (it's about 6 pieces of wood)  and we were able to finish it up with additional framing around the doorway for drywall installation.

We did a quick rinse and repeat for what I affectionately call the blue room - framing it out with 2 by 4s. If you happen to be a builder and notice there's a missing piece, we did add it before drywalling!

With the framing complete, my drywallers could come on in. Fast as always, they managed to mud and tape everything while I was away on a trip. 

And then there were closets - decent sized, even, in an old house! Only one problem... you didn't want to actually put anything in them. Right?

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