How We Transformed Our Tiny Closet in One Weekend

We love a lot of elements of our little, old house, but the tiny closets are not one of them. We wouldn’t call ourselves fashion people by any means (most of our day-to-day pandemic wear is paint-stained project clothes, if we’re honest) but after a quick weekend closet makeover with ClosetMaid’s Suite Symphony system, we feel like we’re shopping in a cute little boutique every time we get dressed.

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What you’ll need:

Take everything out

The first step is starting with a clean slate, so we took everything out of the closet, including the shelf, closet rod and the supports for the shelf. Bonus points: We took the opportunity to do a spring clean and donate some clothes we don’t fit or wear anymore, which truly made it feel like even more of a clean slate.

Add a beadboard accent wall

You could get the same effect from just a bold paint color, but we had some leftover beadboard from another project and decided to use it on the back wall of the closet because why shouldn’t closets get an accent wall?? We just nailed the pieces up with our nail gun and caulked the edges, then primed and painted them (the green is Coriander & Olive by Sherwin-Williams).

Assemble the Suite Symphony system

Once the backdrop was done, I started assembling the closet system. It was really simple – one of the most straight-forward flatpack furniture builds I’ve ever done – and was easy enough to do by myself despite how big the finished product is.

I followed the directions and assembled the shelf units, which are made up of a top and bottom unit, then slid the bottom one into place in the closet.

Secure the system to the wall

The ClosetMaid system comes with L-shaped brackets, so I attached one screw into the wall (with an anchor since mine didn’t go into a stud), and one into the closet system to hold it nice and sturdy. I repeated this process until I had wo brackets in each of the top and bottom pieces, meaning four total. I also made sure the units were level before screwing into the wall, and luckily mine were already perfect, but the feet you screw into the units are actually designed so you can adjust the height of each one and level it if needed!

Attach the shelves and closet rod

If you’ve got a bigger closet than we do, the system comes with three rods so you could put one on one side for longer clothes and two on the other to double up. Since we didn’t have a lot of space, we just used two on the one side and it was perfect. Attaching the rods is really simple, there are only two screws in each bracket. The biggest thing to worry about is making sure the rod is level both horizontally and vertically before you mark and screw in your brackets.

Add the shelves into place at whatever height you need them by adding the clear supports into the corresponding holes inside the unit.

Put all your clothes back in!

And you’re done! Next you’ll add all your clothes back in and will probably have plenty of room to spare in your new system. We hope you enjoyed this little makeover as much as we did – sign up to our blog newsletter to stay up-to-date on all our projects!