You know the feeling when you look at something so much, that you don’t really notice it anymore? This is what happened with our bathroom closet. Before we moved into our house in 2016, we had a total renovation done on our bathroom. New shower, new vanity, new floor, the works. It was necessary at the time considering it’s our only full bathroom, and it was leaking into the garage! The only part of the bathroom that didn’t get touched was the closet.

Five years have gone by, and our bathroom closet still looks exactly the same as it did on move-in day. It has particle board shelves that aren’t nailed in, and dingy off-white paint that’s likely original to the house’s construction in 1970. The closet never made it too high on our list of priorities because, well, it’s just a closet. We use it to store towels, linens, and toiletries – nothing fancy. But after we built a board and batten accent wall in our office, we felt confident enough in our woodworking skills to finally upgrade the closet shelves!

Demo & Painting

First, we took everything out of the closet and put it all in a spare bedroom. And since the existing shelves weren’t nailed in, we just lifted them right out. Talk about the easiest demo ever! We left the wall supports (which are pine 1x2s nailed into the studs) for the shelves because we actually really like the spacing of the shelves. Once you live with something for a while, you get a better feel for what needs to be changed. For us, it was just the dated look of the shelves that we didn’t like.

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With the shelves gone, we had a blank canvas to work with. We cleaned up the closet by vacuuming all the cobwebs and dust, and then washed the walls with a solution of warm water and dish soap (*blue Dawn is our go-to). When the walls dried, we rolled on two coats of paint (Maui Mist by Behr) using a mini foam roller, and used our favorite paint brush for cutting in to the edges. We painted the yellow shelf supports Ultra Pure White by Behr. You can see the full list of our house’s paint colors here!

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The picture on the left is after one coat of paint, and the one on the right is after two coats. Paint makes everything look better! We hadn’t 100% finished painting the shelf supports when we took these pictures (we later painted the corners and underneath the supports).

Building the shelves

With the bathroom closet all fresh, clean, and painted, it was time to build the shelves. Our closet is 24 inches wide and about 14 inches deep, and we needed to build four shelves. We settled on 24 inches x 12 inches for our shelf dimensions, that way we would leave some depth leftover to add a 1×2 to the front of the shelves. Adding a 1×2 covers up the raw edge of the plywood, and also makes the shelves look more substantial. Win-win! Here’s a full list of the materials that we used:

• One piece of 2 ft. x 4 ft. pine plywood
• One 8-foot primed pine 1×2″
• Circular saw
• Nail gun
• 1 1/2″ nails for nail gun
• Wood filler
• Tack cloth or damp rag
• Orbital sander or sanding sponge
• Caulk
• Caulk gun

We started by cutting our 2 ft. x 4 ft. piece of plywood into four shelves. Another reason we chose 12 inches as our shelf depth is because 4 feet = 48 inches, and 48/12 = 4 shelves! One piece of plywood was perfect for what we needed. We marked our measurements with a pencil, and used a circular saw to cut the wood (a table saw would be ideal for this, but we don’t have one, so a circular saw did the trick). You could also ask your home improvement store to cut down your plywood for you if you want 😉 Using our miter saw, we cut our 8-foot 1×2″ piece into four 2-foot pieces for the shelf fronts.

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Once we finished cutting the 1x2s, we used an orbital sander to sand them smooth. A sanding sponge would be fine to use too, power tools are just faster! Then, we vacuumed every piece and wiped them down with a tack cloth to remove the remaining dust from sanding. Before jumping into painting, we did a dry fit of the shelves by placing them in the closet on the shelf supports to make sure everything fit. Make sure to do this in case you need to make extra cuts!

We painted the shelves Ultra Pure White to match the shelf supports. The shelves took four coats of paint since we were working with raw wood. The paint we use is a paint & primer combo, so four coats is essentially the same as two coats of primer and two coats of paint. The 1x2s only needed two coats because we bought them already primed. Buying pre-primed wood is a little pricier, but worth the extra money!

Installing the shelves

Next, we placed our painted shelves in the closet on the supports. With our nail gun, we shot one nail from the top of the shelf into the middle of the shelf support, and repeated this so the shelves were secured on all three sides. Feel free to add as many nails as you wish, we were happy with one on each side. Keep in mind that more nails = more nail holes to fill later on.

After we nailed in after the shelves, we nailed our painted 1×2 pieces to the front of the shelves. The top of the 1×2 should be flush with the shelf. Use one hand to hold the 1×2 in place, and the other hand to operate the nail gun. We used two nails to secure each 1×2. Now we had a functional closet! You never know how much you need your closet until it’s out of commission.

Finishing details

The shelves are cut, painted and installed- so what’s next? Finishing work! The little details here will take some time and patience, but are so worth it for a professional-looking project. Once we reach this stage of a project, my type-A personality takes over – I won’t stop until everything is perfect. Here’s what we did to finish up:

1. Fill all the nail holes with wood filler or spackle.
2. Once the wood filler/spackle dries, sand until smooth and clean up the sanding dust.
3. Paint over the nail holes.
4. Caulk where the edges of the shelves meet the walls, and where the 1×2 meets the shelf for a seamless look (no gaps!)
5. Dip your finger in water and run your finger along the caulk to remove the excess (see our post on caulking for a step-by-step tutorial)
6. Once the caulk dries (read the back of the caulk tube for drying time), paint the caulk.
7. Style your shelf with cute baskets, bins, etc!

This picture gives you a good look at where we placed our nails. We snapped this after filling the nail holes, and before caulking and touch-up painting. I really need to take more progress pictures! Check out the highlight reel called “shelves” on our Instagram if you want to see more pictures and videos.

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Voila! Nothing like a nice before-and-after comparison to wrap things up. The updated closet matches the rest of the bathroom now, and feels like a big improvement! Our only regret is waiting so long to do this. Every time we take on a project, we learn new things and grow our confidence in DIYing. Finally our bathroom is 100% done!