We have a coat closet in our living room that wasn’t used for much besides random storage. Since we live in the South, we only really need coats for about a month. We each have one and they stay in our bedroom closets during the warmer months and on the coat rack by the door in the winter. The coat closet wasn’t being used well and I had plans for it anyway.

Wesley loves to play board games but the games were kept in prime avalanche conditions in the closet or on the upper shelves of a bookshelf. Every time he wanted to play a game, he needed help to get it. That screwed up the spontaneity of game play and made it harder for me to dodge another game of Sorry. I thought it would be nice to put some shelves into the closet so the games would be out of sight and easily accessed by the shorter people in our household. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the rest of the closet. I was thinking about putting more shelves in, but I didn’t want to build storage just for the sake of storage.

Then I had a crazy idea. I could find an interesting way to display Paul’s guitar and amp so they would be easy to get to; he wouldn’t have to dig the guitar out of its case and the amp out of its box every time he wanted to play. I had it on good authority that Santa was bringing the kids a guitar of their own, too. I planned the shelves so there would be room for his amp underneath them. I used online tutorials to build the shelves and they were done for less than $35. I had the shelves in and Paul was putting his guitar case in there one evening.

Paul: I don’t know if you’ve thought of this, but wouldn’t it be cool if you made the rest of the closet…

Me: Shut up, you’ll ruin it.

So he figured it out. It was pretty obvious, anyway. I’m not really sure how I thought I was going to keep it a secret with all the painting I’d have to do in there. He was going to find out or I was going to succumb to paint fumes in a closet with the door closed. I told him my idea which I usually do with fear and trembling, because he’s great at shooting down my ideas for stupid reasons like “faulty logic” and “that’s a load-bearing wall.” However, he gave this project a thumbs-up.

I didn’t have it done by Christmas, but that worked out well, because Santa brought me a ukelele. (I think it was Santa’s bid to get me in a grass skirt and coconuts, but the joke’s on him because coconuts don’t come that small.)

This is the finished product:

I don’t usually travel far from gray and bluish gray when it comes to painting walls. Any bright color in our house is Paul’s doing and I’m surprised they even let me into the paint section at Lowe’s by myself. Since this project was behind a door, I felt branching out would be less risky. I picked out paint chips, brought them home and set them behind the instruments. I got the final colors in sample size for about $2.50/each and it was plenty for two coats. The walls were completed with a pint. We found some great guitar hangers on Amazon that easily adjusted to different instruments. Instead of using the screws they came with, I attached them to studs with drywall screws. The shelves were painted with a white semigloss we had in the garage. I let them cure for two weeks before putting anything on them so they wouldn’t get tacky. Everyone can reach their instruments and they’re getting a lot of use.

I named it The Music Room. Paul said it didn’t count as a room if you couldn’t get more than one person in there. In the middle of showing him how two people could fit in there quite comfortably, he agreed that I could call it anything I like.