Before/After: Walk-In Closet

"It's always summer somewhere." -Lilly Pulitzer

What if every summer day started with listening to birdsong from green leafy trees, enjoying Pilates and meditation and dreaming the Golden Age into being, choosing colorful cotton clothes (natural fibers only!), and playing with sweet Jorji the cat before playing some tennis or doing some reading?

That's the idea of the Summer Serenity Cottage and of the walk-in closet I fashioned here from a spare room!

Before

At the top of the stairs to the second floor of the house I am renting for the summer to escape the noise and vibration from faulty roofing at my regular place, you find yourself in a room which could be the kitchen if the house were a two-flat. You can see upper cabinets in the photos above and below, which I use to store towels and my bathroom items such as my toothbrush, because the bathroom doesn't have a medicine cabinet or much space. In a photo below you can also see a white cabinet I brought from my regular place -- and a Lake Michigan photo and more, making it really more of an After photo but that's ok : )

Through this room, to the right, is the agonizingly hot and moldy sunroom I don't use and keep closed, one of several parts of the house I don't use and keep closed (e.g. basement, side porch, two covered patio areas behind the kitchen, back deck, a few kitchen cabinets, etc.). 

In fact, when two women came to see the house the other day because one of them was considering renting it, the other one opened the door to the moldy sunroom and said, after one look and one smell, I can see why you don't use it! She turned to her friend, the potential new resident, and said, You wouldn't be using this room either; do you smell that mold? (For other parts of their visit, the context around it, and other doors they opened, rightly so, to spaces I chose not to use, also rightly so, see my Staircase post.)

Straight ahead from the top of the stairs is the upstairs bathroom (glimpsed in the photo above), to the left is a room that could be a living or sitting room, off of that is my home office, and all the way to the front of the house on the second floor is my bedroom. (You can see these and get a better sense of the layout at the bottom of the After section, below.)

The room at the top of the stairs has a closet that doesn't open. Living out of suitcases at the start of summer was fun for Jorji the cat who likes to be on or in or near suitcases. It was less fun for me. (There is a linen closet upstairs, and a separate closet in the home office, but these are small and in need of ventilation and I'd already given them other uses: storage space for some of the boxes I moved in with, so that I can move back out with them, though the bulk of these are downstairs in the Cat Room closet; and storage space for some of the items the house came with that I chose not to use, such as those hell red curtains that were found on the home office window until I removed them immediately.)

That was all fine and gave me an excuse to decorate a room that wasn't on my original list of rooms to decorate:

Yes: I decided to turn this room at the top of the stairs into a walk-in closet, as you'll see below in the After section along with my step-by-step plan!

The room came with an ironing board that folds out from the wall, by the way. A 1906 original, which is when the house was built? Or was it installed when the house was renovated in what I estimate to be the 1950s or so? I considered incorporating this ironing board into my walk-in closet design, but decided against it because the wood and compartment have a rotting smell, and because I do not iron and am not a fan of ironing, even in an ironic way, and because my theme for the space is Great Lakes preppy summer camp, as my theme for the cottage is Great Lakes beach cottage, and who wants to iron or even think about ironing at summer camp or the beach? Not this camper. I'm here for serenity, and it's much too hot and humid anyway to think about adding unnecessary steam!

While we're still in the Before, which as always in this cottage and in this blog is also the Ongoing --

The house is what I call only "lightly electrified:" some electrical outlets don't work such as the one in the upstairs bathroom and the one in the reading nook I set up in my bedroom (it turned out I'd created a daytime reading nook, and a very pleasant one), and the ceiling fan / lighting fixture in the living room has no mechanism by which to turn it on (no wall switch, no fixture switch, no remote control). There are exposed electrical wires in some spaces throughout the house, including practically exploding from the ceiling in this room at the top of the stairs.

The landlord told me: "I don't do electrical."

Here is the landlord hanging around outside, as seen from the walk-in closet window today:

He lives in the house just behind the house I'm renting, and, a few times a day, every day, if I look out of any given window, there he is. Sometimes he's chatting with a neighbor. Sometimes he's watering the grass. Once or twice he was walking a dog across the front lawn. Sometimes he's outside the dining room, or living room, or other room, always wearing the same or a different but similar t-shirt / shorts / cap combo. 

Just now: he's riding a bike past the house. 

That's better than where he used to be: on the porch looking into my living room, on the doorbell trying to get me to let him in, or in my house unannounced after letting himself in. I did my best to put a stop to all that, and to make it clear that a standard arm's-length tenant-landlord agreement was plenty. I set clear boundaries yet saw fluctuating results, as you know if you read the previous post (Staircase, linked above) for example.

[Update: I saw the landlord outside the house again that night, making it three times that day. I came home in a Lyft as the landlord was walking along the side of the house. I exited the Lyft in front of the house, and the landlord stood and glowered at me. Do you know how you can just feel mean energy coming off a person sometimes? That's what I felt. The driver kindly carried my bag up the porch stairs, and as I opened the front door, the landlord stood on the front lawn and glared at us both. The driver said hi and the landlord said nothing and kept glaring and staring. As I entered, the landlord walked to the other side of the house, still glowering and glaring. The driver asked what's wrong with that guy? I have a mean and creepy landlord, I replied. From inside, I watched the landlord stand and glare at the driver as he sat in his car until he drove away. I don't see other neighbors even once a day. I shouldn't see my landlord three times a day, and he should not stare and glare. Under the law, he is trespassing, and verging into assault and stalking. I do not need this emotional distress. I paid money to rent the house for SERENITY!]

Back to the interior of the house:

The house has not been modernized, and in addition to its only mild to moderate electrification, was not set up for wifi, and I held out as long as I could before installing a month-to-month plan. The cottage has no vents or ducts, just radiators, rotting windows, who-knows-what in the ceiling above the angry-looking exposed wiring in this room at the top of the stairs, and yet a great deal of charm.

After

Headline: Unused room at top of the stairs becomes walk-in closet based on my idea of the preppy dream closet I wished I had at summer camp! : )

Step 1: Rug. I chose a green-and-white striped cotton rug by Safavieh for the space, to match the runner I placed in my bedroom, and to recall the navy-and-white striped rug I placed downstairs, all in line with the color scheme and overall nautical feel of my concept for the cottage. 

Jorji still liked the suitcases.

The landlord ran all over the new rug, in his outside shoes, the day after I put it down, while I was having tea with a friend. He rang the doorbell, and I regretted letting him in. He asked my Chinese-American friend where she was from. He said he wanted to check something, and he ran upstairs. As soon as he saw my new rug, he said how nice it was and then stepped all over it. He moved my suitcases, opened the sunroom door I very purposefully keep closed against the mold and heat, went into my bathroom, stepped on my clean bathmats that I had also just put down and climbed onto the toilet (still in his outside shoes), ran his hands over a place that needed replastering (everyplace in the house needs replastering), jumped down onto the bathmats again and then into the bathtub, touched and moved my shower gel and lotion, opened the bathroom window, and stuck his torso outside, before saying he was going to have to replaster that patch on the bathroom wall. I replied that it could wait until I moved out.  

Step 2: Furniture. I organized the space with a hamper, shelves plus a white cotton and leather basket to act as a drawer, pouf that I moved from the living room where it hadn't really seemed to be in the right place yet, and clothing rack. 

The latter came in what looked at a glance like dozens of pieces; putting such items together is not a skill or favorite activity of mine, so I called my handyman Johnny from TaskRabbit who handled it perfectly, and who then attached the assembled rack to the wall using a drill. 

Step 3: Decor. I love and miss wooden tennis rackets! I learned to play the game with a wooden racket, and am thinking of starting a club for wooden racket enthusiasts! I ordered two classic wooden rackets from Etsy, hung them on the wall of my preppy summer camp closet of the imagination, and take them down sometimes to play tennis on the local courts! 

The rackets work, and my old lessons are coming back to me: keep your eye on the ball; hit it in the sweet spot. Do you know that when I was 16, I was the Park Forest Park District tennis champion the summer before I went to college? It was the summer of 1986! Such fun!

I ordered some tennis balls from Dick's Sporting Goods, and Jorji loves their great bounce throughout the house. She races through the walk-in closet and the entire enfilade of rooms upstairs when she gets the zoomies, scrunching up the rug with her traction and velocity. She also loves our new rackets, and the walk-in closet overall!

Oh we're not done yet:

The walk-in closet seemed the perfect place to hang a couple of wooden frames from Blick that await a new project:

The walk-in closet leads into another room I wasn't going to decorate, which has become the dance studio / beach towel cabana / wifi corner / landline telephone nook turned Lake Michigan shrine for my Great Lakes theme / Jorji's cat bed corner as she appropriated a cacao sack I was going to hang on the home office wall:

The upstairs has an airy feeling that I wanted to keep and accentuate. Of course, the problems in this space and throughout the house caused by lack of maintenance or cleaning throughout the years are still there, such as rotten windows, cracked plaster, scratched floors, grime that won't go no matter how many times I scrub, and those electrical wires bursting from the ceiling.

One of my mottos this summer: decor and ignore! That is: decorate what I can, ignore what I can't. Summer is just three months, and my goal for this summer has been: contemplation, relaxation, decoration. Relaxation was challenged by circumstances that tended to inspire aggravation, but relaxation prevailed. My preppy summer camp closet helped!

Onward and upward!

Your friend in decorating,

Valerie

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Thank you!