Closet Shelves – Custom in our Basement!

Building custom closet shelves in the basement to accommodate our storage requirements and a new chest freezer! Way, way, WAY back when I first designed this basement on the idea of renting it out I built this closet to accommodate a washer and drier and then planned on putting rods above them for hanging clothes. Fast forward many years later this empty closet was in desperate need of some order and custom shelves besides. We recently purchased a little chest freezer (yay for Menards rebates – our garage addition literally paid for it) and it just made all of the sense for it to go in our basement closet.

We may never use those washer and dryer hookups but there’s no reason to remove them and that washing machine outlet was perfect for this situation. Its even on its own breaker!

As you can see from the before pictures this space is plenty big but without closet shelves we were wasting most of it.

For what might be the first time ever here at Grandma’s House DIY this total project is brought to you by: NOT ME!

Lodi was quite excited one evening and asked if he could take a project off the list and if he could do it. Of course, I said YES! And then I asked, “What are you working on?”

He said custom shelves in our basement closet so we could finally get that, and our chest freezer, organized and squared away.

This project has been on the list for quite awhile now and was becoming more urgent by the day.

Our dog Annie’s food comes frozen in 24 packs at a time and takes up considerable freezer space! Besides that, some lovely venison we harvested this year, part of a steer and a local pig and, not to mention, everything I froze from our garden this summer meant we were bursting out of the little side by side freezers on our two refrigerators.

We’ve had the chest freezer for a couple of months – Lodi was right: it was time to get that closet squared away!

(MORE INFO ABOUT ANNIE’S FRESH DOG FOOD HERE. NOT AN AIFFILIATE LINK. ANNIE LOST WEIGHT AND IS LITERALLY RUNNING AROUND LIKE SHE’S THREE YEARS YOUNGER. THE DIFFERENCE IN HER IS ABSOLUTELY REMARKABLE TO THE POINT WHERE WE JOKE THAT WE SHOULD BE EATING IT!)

Lodi tackled it one morning (letting me sleep in YAY) by first removing everything from the walls. If you look close you can tell that the walls were not normal “wall” material.

Like with everything back in the day: I was totally broke – I used what I had.

That meant this closet’s walls were literally leftover bead board scraps, plywood scraps and old closet doors I pulled out of this house during the renovation.

Lodi left the two side walls open but the back wall he covered with a new piece of plywood as it is also the back wall to our utility room that houses our water heater, well pump, sub pump etc.

From there he got to work on custom closet shelves.

He knew the first shelf was the most important – it had to be sturdy but, above all, high enough to accommodate and open the chest freezer beneath it.

(What’s really great is we had all the materials for this entire project. Lodi even utilized a couple of extra shelf brackets I had leftover from my workbench project too.)

We couldn’t even walk in here before with how much crap we had in this closet.

Here’s an awesome example of how easy it is to waste a ton of space.

Everything that WAS in this closet went back in this closet and just look you guys: MOST OF THE SHELVES HE BUILT ARE EMPTY!

And there are even two bins on the top most shelf that will be heading to long term storage once we get a chance to tackle that project next spring.

As for now we are finally able to utilize our new chest freezer and I am very pleased with my man!

(I could get used to waking up to a finished project more often lol)

We weren’t going to bother painting the floor but after Lodi picked up a sweet little mat for in here it was just screaming to get painted, can’t believe how much more finished and nice this closet looks now!