The Lion, the Witch, and Our Homemade Wardrobe’s

I’m still running on about 3 hours of sleep per night here, due to Reagan’s penchant for frequent night-time nursing but we’re still managing to make progress on our current bedroom project. Albeit not without a little marital discord and child chastisement but sanctification is ongoing right? So our house was built in the 1950’s back when the ladies used to wear like 3 outfits and alternate a few aprons and long before the days of  closets the size of a McDonald’s restaurant. So with my plentiful wardrobe collection, and Dave’s massive sports collection, we’ve been falling pretty short on closet space since we moved in. My awesome “can build absolutely anything” Father-in-law did install these sweet closet doors for us from Home Depot in order to try and generate some more space:

But that whole closet is full of only my clothes. Dave’s clothes are living in Noah’s closet, Noah’s clothes are living in Reagan’s closet, and Reagan’s clothes are overflowing out of his dresser drawers. So you can imagine my utter enthusiasm when I stumbled upon Young House Love’s brilliant idea of built in wardrobes on either side of the bed to create extra storage. Behold their genius in full glory:

They bought some pretty sweet wardrobes from IKEA that cost about $400 buckaroos but we didn’t have that kind of cash to spend right now so we were planning on just building them ourselves, and by ourselves I of course mean with the help of aforementioned “can build absolutely anything” Father-in-law. So Dave began dumpster diving in all of the local home development construction sites collecting wood, but lo and behold the behemoth’s I happened upon while perusing the amazing UNT Surplus Store (a whole post will most certainly be devoted to that gem of a place in the near future).

I was told they once lived in the Chemistry building of UNT and here they are laying on their sides covering up our entire front room window. I felt like a vampire for a few weeks until we actually got them into the bedroom. These little, or rather massive, beauties cost us only a cool $30 each, and we knew with a little love and paint they would be perfect for our side bed wardrobes and would save my overworked Father-in-law some blood, sweat, and tears.

After many failed attempts of moving the mammoths into the bedroom, Dave finally had to bite the bullet and take them apart and reassemble them inside the bedroom. Here they are flanking the bed. Dave’s Dad didn’t escape this project completely as he did end up shaving a few inches off the bottom of them and put on a few coats of black paint for us. Thanks Pops!

And here is what I accomplished today, a fresh coat of gray paint on the interior so that Dave will actually be able to see his clothes in those caves.

Next on the list is painting the shelves that go inside and getting Dave’s stuff in there. Then we’ll move on to buying and hanging the curtains to go in front of them and building the panel to make them look like built ins. So I will definitely keep you posted. Oh, we also have some sweet new bedding that will brighten up the joint but we’re waiting to get the wardrobes completely done before busting it out of the packaging. That’s all for today, so here’s hoping for maybe 4 to 6 hours of sleep tonight!

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