DIY Closet Shelves

Tell all ya friends and neighbors!

Say goodbye to ugly wire shelving in closets. This super simple DIY closet shelving solution will have you ready to organize your closet in no time!

We have created our fair share of DIY shelving up in this house.

We have open shelving in our kitchen and in our guest bathroom.

We have DIY shelves in our pantry closet.

Now it’s time to add some more in our girls’ shared room. Well, the closet to be more specific.

I feel like the rest of the room being finished hinges on this closet getting done so we can get everything off the floor, out of the way and start organizing!

DIY Closet Shelves

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• 3/4″ plywood
• 1×2 furring strips
• Paint color of your choice (maybe try some of these awesome mauve paint colors!)
• White closet rod
• Curtain rod sockets

FYI: The closet dimensions are 57″w by 50″ deep and the shelf is 80″ from the floor and we have 8′ ceilings.

Just to show you a bit of our reality – this is what we were working with. And if you want to know the REAL truth, this is actually better than what it looks like normally.

I shared a photo with the family on my email list that shows an even more real photo of disaster. To make you feel better about your own mess. If you wanna see behind the scenes things and photos that never hit the blog, you’ll definitely want to sign up for that.

I promise I’m not boring and may even make you chuckle.

If you have wire shelves, you’ll want to first remove the shelves and patch any holes left from the brackets.

If you’re not painting your walls, then you only will need to do some touchups, but for us, we needed to paint the entire closet since it hadn’t been done yet.

We chose Clare Paint in Whipped for the walls and the Meet Cute for another project coming soon! 😉

I had a teency beeb attached to me while Jordan cut and hung these pieces, so I don’t have the photos. Whoops.

But determine the height at which you want your shelf hung and use a large level to mark for the brackets.

Use your stud finder to make sure that you have a solid place to screw your furring strips into and attach it to the wall using wood screws.

Using wood filler, make sure you fill all the holes and the corners where the strips attach so it will bend in well when it’s time to paint.

You’ll then want to paint your furring strips and your pieces of wood that will be used to build your shelves so that everything blends in nicely.

For us this closet is SUPER tiny. It’s only a tiny bit bigger than our primary closet which we made over.

For reference, our primary closet is less than 5 feet wide wall to wall and then 4 feet from the back wall to the door casing. That’s not a typo. It is TINY.

It will be best if you dry fit your wood so that you’re able to pre-drill your pocket hole screws to know where to attach it.

Whether you have an older house or a brand new construction, there is a high probability that your sides of the closet won’t be perfectly straight which is fine, it’s just all the more reason for a dry fit.

For us, since the fit was so tight, we were afraid to scratch up the walls so we actually just left them in there and pocket hole screwed them together to ensure a good fit and to make sure they wouldn’t move.

You could also choose to reinforce it with wood glue if you wanted to, but we didn’t feel that was necessary.

You can either fill the holes with wood filler or Kreg Jig actually makes pocket hole plugs you can put in, add wood filler on top and then simply sand and paint them down.

As you can see, we did neither. BOOP!

Follow the instructions to install the closet rod and its holders and voila! Instant custom closet system!

Now all you need is to add your clothes and accessories.

We added 2 bars up top and then 1 down below for pants and shorter things.

We also need way more drawers because of the sheer amount of clothes girls seem to acquire, so we have a little DIY project in the works for a super cute extra storage solution but it’s not quite ready yet so keep an eye out.

If all goes as planned, it may be one of my favorite projects we’ve done to date! So far, our little playhouse makeover still ranks at the top of that list!