Building A Closet

I have been working on my basement for quite some time now and finally made it to the nitty gritty. That's the part of the project where you can't wait to finish and everyone at Lowes knows you by your first name. Well I'm there! I have a 2 bedroom home with one bath and decided some time ago to remodel the basement to include an office for mad scientist web stuff music and general accounting, a proper laundry room, a full bath and a bedroom. It took some design, re-design and more re-design to work out every little detail, but it was worth it.

I began to wonder what teechnically makes adding a bedroom to a house qualify it as a proper bedroom for resale purposes. I discovered that the deciding factor was that the bedroom had to have a closet. So I built a closet.

There's not much to a closet construction project, but there are some standard construction design methods that work quite well. First you frame the closet walls with 2" x 4" lumber using a top plate, a bottom plate and studs placed on 16" centers. See our framing section for more details. Take into consideration what type of doors you want for your closet and build the framing according to the rough opening size that the doors require. Make sure you allow for the drywall depth in your measurements otherwise you'll be trimming down the doors to fit the finshed opening.

Next skin your walls with drywall and finish coatings. Next you will most likely want a shelf for storage and a closet rod to hang clothing. If you look at the picture we first install a framing plate attached to the wall. 1" x 4" pine lumber works fine for this. A #2 grade lumber is perfect just make sure you check it for bends and warpage. The straighter the lumber the better the finished product. Once the framing is installed we cut a shelf to sit on top of the framing and were pretty much done. I usually wait until everything is painted before installing the rod to avoid paint clean up. You may need to install a closet rod hanger bracket if your closet rod exceeds 36" otherwise your rod will sag and eventually break with the weight of your clothing.

The framing material that you attach to the wall must be attached securely to the wall studs so use a stud finder. There's so many jokes that come to mind, but that would be too obvious. Have fun!

Back 08.11.2006.