Movie Closet Project

Hey everyone, today I’m going to be talking about something other than books. As you may know if you’ve been following me for awhile, my husband and I bought my parent’s house over a year ago and we have been slowly doing projects around the house, making it our own. One of the most recent projects we just completed this past week and I am super excited about it. Besides books, I love and collect movies and tv seasons. I have a pretty large collection and they’ve been housed on mismatched old bookshelves which ended up making our downstairs living area look a little cluttered. Excuse the mess in the below BEFORE photo… this area has been a bit of a catch-all the last few months.

There is a closet space in the downstairs that used to have an old fridge. We got rid of the fridge and started working on finishing the space to turn it into a movie closet. We started with just plain concrete floors and drywall. Ethan added these carpet squares and the baseboard trim. Eventually he will also be adding the trim around the closet opening. For now it’s just raw until he can get the last of the supplies.

Originally I wanted to fill it with Ikea Billy shelves to match my library shelves but the closet wasn’t quite big enough for what I wanted to do so we came up with plan B: making our own shelves. We decided to go a little bit of the easy route and get the shelving racks you hang on the wall and then jazz up some wood boards to add to them.

Our favorite way to add interest to plain pine is to sand them down, torch them to bring out the grain, and then stain and seal them. The above photo is after Ethan torched two of the boards. Once all of the boards were finished, we added some simple bookends to the ends of each board and mounted them on the brackets. We ended up having quite a bit of extra room at the bottom so we talked about adding another board to the bottom. But we ended up going with something we already had at the house that allowed us to add double the storage space.

Here is a closeup of the awesome shelves. I seriously can’t stop looking at them and love how they turned out.

I had so much fun filling the shelves up with all of our tv seasons, blurays, and dvds. Started to run out of room at the bottom so I’m really glad we had these other media shelves that fit perfectly underneath the last shelf. We also decided to add another full bookcase on one side of the closet to house some of the bigger special editions and all of our puzzles and board games.

Here is the finished product! I’m really happy with how everything turned out and I love having them all in one place. Makes it so much easier to find something to watch. Mini tour: top three shelves are TV series, next two shelves are blurays, then DVDs. At the bottom in the media shelves, the left half area all kids movies, and the right half are the rest of the dvds.Not a great photo with the light glaring from above but hey, it’s a basement closet so that’s as good as it’ll get haha. If you’re interested in a more detailed tour of the shelves to check out my collection, let me know in the comments and I will do a more in depth post.

What are some of your favorite tv shows and/or movies?