Really Cool Coat Closet

When I bought our house it had a large foyer but no closet for hanging coats. The previous owners had installed a couple of generic hooks, but that was it. For me, one of the desirable features of our first-floor remodel was a coat closet, and I worked hard to figure out the best way to incorporate one. In the end, we shortened the foyer by about 2 ½ feet which created space for the closet, which is about that deep by 3 feet wide. Last week we finished up the interior of the closet (the door still needs to be varnished, and the door trim + hardware), and we’re using it to store our coats and shoes – among other things. It’s perfect!

It is only a coat closet, but I incorporated a few nifty design features:

1. I wired the closet with power and Ethernet. The closet now serves as the ideal central location on our first floor for the wireless router.

2. The door frame incorporates a pressure-sensitive switch that turns on the closet light when the door is opened. There is a second wall-switch inside the closet that can turn off the light in case you don’t want it on when the door is open.

3. The shelving in the closet is reclaimed from boards that were previously the original kitchen cabinets. They are fir boards that had been painted with many layers of paint that I didn’t feel like stripping. So we sanded them smooth and painted them again – they look great!

4. We have a single black cast-iron hook in the closet that is from the house where Trissa grew up. It’s pretty cool – and we have more of them if we can figure out where to use them. (I’m thinking eventually a mud porch on the back of the house.)

That’s it – here are the pics. If you look closely in the second picture you can see the switch for the light in the doorframe near the upper-left.