Bathroom mega-project, part. 1: a corner closet

After a year’s hiatus, we resume our adventures in renovation!

The baby came along, and there went 2015. But it’s a new year, and life has settled down enough to where we can start thinking again about the house — the bathroom in particular. And what a project that will be! It’s so big a job, it is going to have several opening acts. Allow me to elaborate:

Here’s a quick sketch of the upstairs:

What you can’t see here is that the bathroom is old, gross, and crumbling to pieces beneath our feet. It’s a total gut job. So we hit the drawing board, and with the gracious help of an architect relative, we arrive at the following excellent plan:

In addition to rearranging the bathroom, we’d also like to move the laundry upstairs, into the hall closet. And in order to do that, we need to relocate the closet. So the answer was to build a new one into the southeast corner of the master bedroom, where there’s a little room to spare. And thus, our first project.

We start with Another sketch:

It’s a nice little corner closet, complete with a wall mounted TV. Cool. So let’s get going — measure it up!

The first challenge is that I really don’t want to go tearing into the ceiling. So I’ve decided that if there were firm anchor points for the top plates, I’d be comfortable adding the wall over them So, we line up said anchor points by tracing the walls onto the ceiling and poking a few guide holes through.

This lets us measure up little spacer blocks (made from 4×4 posts) to span crosswise between the joists as needed. And with those in place, we have walls!

An aside about those navy colored pieces — when building new stuff, we like to fit in something sentimental. In this case, I had some lumber from the props we’d made for our wedding. So, in they went.

OK, so, next step: wiring. A couple outlets, switches, and a can light.

I can be a real caveman at times, when it comes to installing things. That recessed light is a good example. Whoopsie! Thankfully some joint compound will heal that wound.

So yes, by the way, I did indeed put a junction box in a wall. Mi scuzi, I’m a weekend warrior. Live and learn.

Anyway, we wallboard it all up now.

… slap on some trim …

… and now it’s looking like a closet!

All came together good enough, cosmetically. The angles on the front face were odd — like 65-70° — and me with my little mitre box, I just got things close, and then doctored it all up after the fact. Thankfully we’re painting! Oh, and Henry helped as well.