Master bathroom closet

Improving the world’s worst closet

The master bedroom’s closet probably isn’t the world’s worst, but for a house this size with many nice features, it’s a pitiful excuse for a walk-in closet. It’s the sort of thing that lets the builder say there is a walk-in closet, but punt on making something really usable. Builders are so cheap!

The shape is a triangle – a cheese wedge – which leaves a large amount of the length only theoretically usable for hanging clothes or putting actual possessions on shelves. And said possessions should be large or in a container or they’ll fall through the wire shelves, lost forever in the muddle on the floor underneath the lower rack of hanging garments.

Neither of us is a clothes horse and most of our shoes are kept in the mud room downstairs (we don’t wear shoes in the house although some Vibram-wearers don’t follow along!) but even so the amount of hanging space is minimal when you exclude the areas too small to fit a hanger. There is no other storage in there – unless you count the attic. Accessing the attic requires getting a ladder and carefully positioning it between the narrowing shelves at the pointy end of the cheese wedge, so I’m not sure that really counts!

In one corner the shelves turn 90 degrees, but that space is largely lost as you can only hang a couple of garments and the spacing on the wire shelves is even wider.

Perhaps triangular closets were a “thing” in 1993? I can certainly see why the trend went nowhere. You can see plans for the new 10′ x 6′ closet, which get us extra space, all of it usable.

The home design site Houzz has some amazing master closets (which are more like the entire upper floor of our house) but we just don’t have the space for something like that – or anything to put in that much clothes storage space.

The frosted glass sliding barn door will allow light in and avoid the walls having pocket doors (too weak to support closet rods). A full length mirror will be added on the outside wall – there isn’t a full length mirror in the current room unless you count standing up on the bathtub surround…