![]() In order to reach all six of our closet units, we had to order extra extension cords. We ordered these puck lights off Amazon and hardwired them into an electrical box, so we could switch them on and off when entering the room. We shimmed under the units to ensure they were completely level, ensuring that the units were level to one another, so when we ran the baseboards across the front of them, everything looked flush. If we had higher ceilings we would have elevated the units on a wooden base to ensure that we weren’t losing any potential storage space when we added baseboards. We only have standard 8” ceilings, so we had to build the units in the room and also couldn’t build a platform for the wardrobe units to sit on. Built the units and made certain they were level. This limited our options down to hanging rods, drawers and shelves.įor reference, the room is 14.6′ long by 6.5′ wide, and we opted for the deeper IKEA Pax units on one side (23″ deep) and shallower units on the other wall (13″ deep), which allowed for a wide walkway between the two units. This isn’t to say that they aren’t helpful to maximize storage, but it’s very challenging to make them look seamless in a high-end custom closet. in favour of clean, classic closet designs. When it came to choosing accessories, I opted out of the slightly gimmicky IKEA accessories, like the pants hanger, the shoe trees, etc. For instance, I fold my jeans, while Cory prefers to hang his, and he dresses business casual for work, meaning there’s a lot of shirts to hang. We cataloged how much space we each needed for our clothes (High, Medium, Low) and storage type by clothing category in a spreadsheet, and then I referenced it as I created each of our sides of the closet to ensure we had enough space for our existing wardrobe items and our storage preferences. This is where the Pax Planning tool on the IKEA website comes in handy. Planned the size of the wardrobe units and the placement of the organizational accessories ![]() Let me know in the comments if anything needs further clarification and I can update to address those questions. We tried to be as detailed as possible in the below steps, so I’m going to give a disclaimer that this post is massive. In order to achieve the high-end custom look I envisioned, we added baseboards, crown moulding, shoe moulding, recessed puck lights for in-cabinet lighting, refaced the fronts and sides of the wardrobe units with wood strips, added wood drawer fronts, added plugs to cover the unused shelving holes, wallpapered the back of the units, primed and painted everything, then swapped out the metal hanging rods for stained wooden rods, and finally added drawer hardware. So, let’s get started on how we transformed our closet from this: Most people hid the drawers by adding doors on the wardrobe units, but we didn’t have the space, or the desire to add so many unnecessary cabinet doors to our space. The drawer fronts were critical to my vision: the IKEA Pax drawers look very modular and modern to me, making them stick out like a sore thumb in our 1940’s home. But there were some upgrades that I wasn’t able to find any examples of in the wild, including recessing in-cabinet lighting and adding drawer fronts for an inset, full custom cabinetry look. ![]() In my research, I discovered that lots of people have hacked the IKEA Pax or IKEA Billy systems to create a built-in look. I’m no stranger to the concept of hacking IKEA products, though we actually had never done it ourselves. And in this search, the IKEA Pax kept coming up as the most common, highest-rated, and budget-friendly closet system. So, I sought out a closet system that I could customize and paint to match my vision. I initially assumed that we would make all the cabinetry from scratch, but Cory brought me back to reality with the truths that 1) we’d never built a cabinet in our lives, let alone lots of drawers, shelves and boxes, and 2) the cabinetry would take forever, and would make this room impossible to accomplish for the One Room Challenge. I absolutely adored the blue, custom cabinetry and decided I was going to figure out a way to get a similar look in my own house with a non-custom budget. When I first started imagining how I wanted my closet to look, I became stuck on this image of Jenny Wolf’s closet.
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