The Secret Closet
As a kid, I used to tap walls, looking for secret rooms. I wanted to find one desperately! But I never did until we bought this house.
This is the entrance hall of our flat when we moved in:
My pantry is behind the stairs and although one of the shelves in there is under the stairs, I just felt like there should be even more room under the stairs. I tapped the walls -- definitely hollow -- and looked behind the radiator and found a bit of plywood panel showing behind it (the rest had been plastered and painted over). The definitely used to be a doorway there, I knew it!
My joiner* was a bit skeptical, but I insisted he cut a hole in the wall anyway. He looked in and told my kids he saw a skeleton! He didn't, but he did see a decently sized cupboard. There were coat hooks and shelves!
So I had him cut the doorway back open and put a frame around it. We found all of the house's old stair rods on the top shelf! We moved the heater into the kitchen and just routed the piping under the floorboards of the cupboard and up and through the walls. I just love copper pipes, don't you?
Then I went to Glasgow Architectural Salvage** and got a door. (Well, you wouldn't expect an eco-punk with a penchant for antiques and old things like me to get a new door would you?)
The next step was to put a floor in the closet. The original floor was there, but the wood was super dry and we were worried about smells and noise coming up from the flat underneath us, so we put a wooden floor on top of the wooden floor (this is pretty standard). I picked a bamboo floor because bamboo is cheap, super hard, and sustainable. (I love the colour, too, but that was a bonus.)
Now I have a really handy closet, where we keep coats, backpacks, DIY bits and bobs, the vacuum cleaner, and more.
The closet obviously used to be well used. Who panelled over it and why? It just seems absurd! The previous two tenants (one of whom was there for a very long time) didn't know about it. That also seems rather surprising, as I knew something was amiss almost as soon as we'd moved in!
Next on my list is to stain and gloss the frame. I'm going to do a dark walnut stain because eventually, I'd like to strip all the doors, skirting boards, and door frames back to the wood and stain them dark. I just think it looks so elegant.
* When I referred to him as "my joiner," a friend of mine said, "Haha, you have a joiner -- you just said 'my joiner' like it's no big thing." And yeah, I said it all casual, like a rich person or something. Well, I am the Champagne Anarchist!
I could do a whole blog post about my joiner, or at least all the work he's done around my house. Maybe I will!
** I could do a whole blog about them, too. -- they are amazing!
This is the entrance hall of our flat when we moved in:
My pantry is behind the stairs and although one of the shelves in there is under the stairs, I just felt like there should be even more room under the stairs. I tapped the walls -- definitely hollow -- and looked behind the radiator and found a bit of plywood panel showing behind it (the rest had been plastered and painted over). The definitely used to be a doorway there, I knew it!
My joiner* was a bit skeptical, but I insisted he cut a hole in the wall anyway. He looked in and told my kids he saw a skeleton! He didn't, but he did see a decently sized cupboard. There were coat hooks and shelves!
So I had him cut the doorway back open and put a frame around it. We found all of the house's old stair rods on the top shelf! We moved the heater into the kitchen and just routed the piping under the floorboards of the cupboard and up and through the walls. I just love copper pipes, don't you?
Then I went to Glasgow Architectural Salvage** and got a door. (Well, you wouldn't expect an eco-punk with a penchant for antiques and old things like me to get a new door would you?)
The next step was to put a floor in the closet. The original floor was there, but the wood was super dry and we were worried about smells and noise coming up from the flat underneath us, so we put a wooden floor on top of the wooden floor (this is pretty standard). I picked a bamboo floor because bamboo is cheap, super hard, and sustainable. (I love the colour, too, but that was a bonus.)
Now I have a really handy closet, where we keep coats, backpacks, DIY bits and bobs, the vacuum cleaner, and more.
The closet obviously used to be well used. Who panelled over it and why? It just seems absurd! The previous two tenants (one of whom was there for a very long time) didn't know about it. That also seems rather surprising, as I knew something was amiss almost as soon as we'd moved in!
Next on my list is to stain and gloss the frame. I'm going to do a dark walnut stain because eventually, I'd like to strip all the doors, skirting boards, and door frames back to the wood and stain them dark. I just think it looks so elegant.
* When I referred to him as "my joiner," a friend of mine said, "Haha, you have a joiner -- you just said 'my joiner' like it's no big thing." And yeah, I said it all casual, like a rich person or something. Well, I am the Champagne Anarchist!
I could do a whole blog post about my joiner, or at least all the work he's done around my house. Maybe I will!
** I could do a whole blog about them, too. -- they are amazing!
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