Working Closets

After the beautification of our bedroom walls, Jim’s attention shifted to our closet doors. From a picture they looked like normal bifold closet doors. When you touched the doors, you realized they were metal bifold doors. They were heavy and ugly.  Oh and to top it off, they got stuck when you tried to slide them open.  This is a picture:

Closet Before

You can’t get the feel for how bad they were because as I mentioned before – they look normal in a picture.  Notice how the doors go from the floor to the ceiling?  Well that was a whopping 80+ inches of door.  When we started looking for new bifold doors, we quickly found out they do not sell doors this height anymore.  This meant it was time to build.

We needed to build a header in order to add wall beneath the ceiling. We went to Home Depot and got two by fours, dry wall, and molding. We measured and cut the two by fours (when I say we, I mean Jim cut and I held the wood in place). Then we built the molding. Jim was worried our header wouldn’t bear the weight of the doors so instead of putting two by fours 32 inches apart, we put them 16 inches apart.

Cutting the wood

The saw!

Almost ready!

Jim cut part of the wall where the holding needed to go.  He cut it so perfectly, it took a lot of hammering and pushing to get the holding in place. One in, we nailed in the dry wall, and caulked along the sides. Once the caulk was dry, we sanded and then painted our holding – it looked like the wall was always like that!

Voila!

The wall is cut and ready for the header

The header is up - Jim is screwing on the drywall

Drywall is done!

All painted with new molding!

Half the doors are up

Doors up without the knobs

Complete!

We put in our new bifold doors…that were made of WOOD (so nice). We already painted the doors, so we didn’t need to do anymore paint once they were up. The hardest part of the doors were getting them level and in line with each other.  The finishing touch was adding new molding. The closet doors work perfectly now!  Just four more set of closet doors to go…

Jim’s Update — Kerry misremembered some details.  I wasn’t worried about the weight of the doors, as the weight actually rests on the floor and the track on the header just keeps the doors level (I’ll spare you the force diagram).  I was worried about the weight of the header itself.  To reduce some weight I put the studs 24 inches apart instead of the standard 16.  So just in case you read the post and were thinking “what idiot would add unnecessary studs when he’s worried about weight”, yeah, I didn’t.