Master Closet Phase 1: From Bad to Worse

Hey everybody!  Thanks for checking in on us.  We’ve been busy around Heardmont, but now it’s time to catch up!

This post is a little preview for you all to see how far things have come in our master closet since we moved into our first home two years ago.  We’ve been spending a lot of time sprucing up and organizing in our little walk-in the past few weeks, but you have to see where we started to truly appreciate the changes.

Here’s our closet two years ago, before we’d even officially bought our first place.

Shag carpet, wood trim, off white walls, and popcorn ceilings with a globe light fixture weren’t exactly our choice of finishes, but “Hey, it’s a closet.  Who really cares what it looks like in there anyway?”

Then came the flood.

Halfway through laundry day in the summer of ’08, our washing machine hose came out of the wall and soaked the carpet, not only in our hallway, but through the wall into our master closet.

So out with the soaked and musty carpet and in with the ceramic tile.  We selected the tiles to match those in our adjoining bathroom, but as it was our first DIY tiling job, we failed to see the importance of staying as neat as possible and cleaning up our messes BEFORE they dried.

Yes, that’s dried mortar all over every single tile in our too-big-for-its-own-good closet.  And yes, that’s a chisel and a mallet waiting for me to pick them back up and slowly chisel away all that dried mortar.  Thanks house.  Lesson learned.

Then it was time to grout.  After hours of chiseling and scrubbing away the excess mortar, we finally did something right.  Some people say grouting is their least favorite part of installing their own tile, but for us, it went as smooth as buttah.  Our saving grace was most likely the fact that we read the instructions and bought the pre-mixed variety. 🙂

I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you how long it took for us to get to this point, but once we had those tiles grouted, we decided it was good enough for the time being and moved our clothes back in.

So here’s how our closet looked until about four weeks ago.  Not pretty to look at, but somewhat functional and thankfully not carpeted in musty shag!

Left side:

Right side:

Check back tomorrow for the next phase of this project: Going Under the Knife and thanks for visiting!

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