So it’s been a while since I posted, because life happened, and the holidays, and anyway. This is the tale of weekend number 9. On Friday morning I looked at my closet, and decided that it was time to shorten the curtains I’m using as doors for it (I’ll tell you in a moment of my newly-discovered and intense hatred of sliding doors). This meant I needed to set up my sewing machine. As aforementioned in this blog, the kitchen table is covered in stuff and therefore unusable. My art desk, assembled because of the kitchen table situation, is a high desk, so you can’t use a pedal sewing machine on it. So clearly, this meant I was going to have to build the closet desk in the studio.

The closet in the studio was a kind of unexpected project – I’d been thinking it was going to just be a closet. But I discovered that I hate sliding doors. You would think this discovery might just mean I’d replace them, but that would mean you hadn’t met me. I removed them, and then I looked at the space and thought “hey, there’s that weird closet-desk in the guest bedroom, I could just move that in here, and then I’d have another workspace… like, where my sewing machine could live!” So that’s been in my head for a couple of weeks, ever since taking out the doors (and donating them to the Habitat Restore – a seriously awesome place).

the only image of the closet I can find from before

Now I needed a space to use the sewing machine. It was clearly time. So I took out the current shelving in the closet, the bar for hanging clothes on, and took my drill to the guest bedroom closet for the removal of the desk. Six screws later, the desk was out of the guest bedroom.

And that’s when I discovered that the guest bedroom closet and the studio closet? Are not the same size. Luckily, the studio one is smaller, so all I had to do was cut down the desk. And its supports. And the shelf that was already there, because it wasn’t actually in all the way. Oh, and also buy a 6 ft 1×12 board, because what had been masquerading as the top shelf was actually 3 separate 1×4 boards. Oh, and repaint all the shelves, the desk, and the closet itself, because the one coat of white wasn’t covering the previous… blueish?… paint very well.

empty, doorless closet; curious, headless cat

So Friday I bought the board I needed (mental note – Home Depot wins for having the length and type of board I needed), and took it and all the other wood I had to cut over to my parents’ house, where my father has a table saw. This required fitting all the pieces into my car, which is rather small. After removing the passenger seat headrest and doing some creative maneuvering, it all fit. Someday I will have a table saw of my very own, and I will love it. But that’s a ways off, and as long as I can fit the wood into my car, I can go use my dad’s saw when I need to. He also helped me stabilize the big pieces while cutting, and showed me that his saw can cut angles, which I totally didn’t know before. And then I took all my pieces home again, and laid them out on plastic in the basement and painted them. And later flipped them over and painted the other side.

Saturday was really busy, so all I got to do was paint the side walls and ceiling of the closet white, and add another coat to all the shelves and supports.

Sunday I painted the back of the closet, and installed the supports. And then, at nearly 10:00 at night, discovered that both shelves and the desk were still too long to fit in the space. So I did the only thing I could come up with at that moment: put them all in my car so I could cut them shorter during my lunch break on Monday.

Monday I cut all the pieces that needed to be shorter, went home, and installed them over lunch. Of course, they’re all just slightly short now, but it’s not too bad. And now I have a usable closet-desk, with shelves above it. But all of this began because I wanted to shorten my closet curtains, and they’re still dragging on the ground. Maybe someday I’ll actually get to sew them.

Dante investigates the new look