We’ve been living without a master bedroom closet for quite a while now. It’s become quite natural to walk down the hall to one of the spare bedrooms and rifle through the closet in there, using the entire bedroom as a changing area and place to pile up dirty clothes. It’s luxurious, really, having an entire room to store my wardrobe full of paint-spattered tank tops and torn jeans.

But we know, deep down, that a closet in the  master bedroom is high on the list of things people consider necessary. And you know what? Stealing a few feet from one wall and turning it into a closet isn’t that difficult or expensive. It requires some basic framing and drywalling, but nothing too intimidating. If you’re a beginner, it’s a good project to learn some framing techniques on.

Our master bedroom closet will run the length of one wall about 8′ long, and will end about 1″ from the doorway. It will be a little over 2″ deep – you should make it at least 26″-28″ so you can hang clothes in there comfortably.

The materials for our closet include:

• framing lumber
• sheetrock and drywall compound
• wire shelving
• bar for hanging clothes
• two bi-fold doors

I’m figuring about $8 -100 in framing/drywall  materials and another $120 for some decent white bi-fold doors in that shutter-style. We have quite a few leftover 2×4’s lying around so hopefully we can make use of them.  You can get doors for around $40 each if you’re ok with cheaper styles and materials.

It won’t be fancy and all built-in gorgeous like I had once imagined, but that’s ok. Sometimes I get a wee bit carried away imagining all the fun carpentry work we could be doing if only we had about 40 extra hours in each day…..

Family Handyman has some great photos and a full run-down of the process here: http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=18160

Anyone have any fancy closets they want to show off?