Closets and the Joy of Remodeling

The transformation of our bedroom closet (from the Portland remodel)

From a dark closet in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this is “Don’t Remember Me Like This.” I’m Nathaniel Barber. Don’t Remember Me Like This is a homemade, nonfiction podcast and diary thing.

This episode is a short story about the terrible thing we all put ourselves through when we choose to remodel our home. It’s also about my obsession with closets, how a closet is more than just about storage space, it is a joy, even if you have to put yourself through hell to enjoy it.

Enjoy.

Closets, and the Joy of Remodeling

Right away, during our first walk-through in what would become our beloved home in Saint Paul, I noticed the closets. In the main bedroom, there was one closet on either side of the room. Outside the house it was a typical biting cold Minnesota January. But inside the closets somehow it seemed much colder.

I pointed out this phenomenon to Jaclyn and the real estate agent accompanying us through the showing. They agreed, it seemed much colder in the closets than outside.

Until that point, our tour through the house had been a dreamy waltz.

In my head, I was already prancing through our new home and, with the help of several friendly woodland creatures, redecorating with magical flourishes. Together in a rapturous song, we added a tastefully curated assortment of stout, shaker furniture, juxtaposed by heavy velvet curtains with a violent tropical floral pattern. I added lit candelabras in the west wing and a brimming Thanksgiving bounty steaming on a grand dining room table.

Standing in the dreary, frigid closets was a sobering jolt back to reality. I took an extra moment to commit to memory the creaking floorboards and watch my breath swirl in thick clouds around the single chain-pull murder light in the cracked plaster ceiling. The crime scene was enough to pull me back down to earth and to practically consider the real work the house would need and to compare this against the cruel realities of hunting for a home in the Twin Cities’ impossible housing market.

So far, our search for a new home had been an emotional journey.

Jaclyn’s and our daughter’s closet (the wall between the two was removed and over-rebuilt)

We’d taken time off work and spent weekends crisscrossing the Twin Cities to view and consider so many dead-end dumps and overpriced bidding traps. We’d gotten up our hopes for a variety of homes. But making an offer is never as simple as it sounds. It’s not just making a bid. There was paperwork, of course. Then there was the emotional rollercoaster that followed. The not-knowing. The waiting to hear back. The aforementioned mental redecorating and remodeling until, by the time the owner would either turn down our offer or just simply ghost us altogether, we’d be all but moved in and raising an imaginary family in our make-believe home.

Giving up on a home was saying goodbye to a neighborhood we’d imagined living in for years and the lifelong neighbors and friends who we hadn’t yet met.

Giving up meant returning to the weird community of tangential house hunters who were also looking for homes in the same price range and location as we were, many of whom we had the displeasure of running into at multiple showings. To this strange crowd of regulars we might offer a friendly nod, as one might acknowledge a frequent, or a polite “excuse us” as we navigated around each other in a mildewy hallway or some stairway with godawful, dog-trodden carpet. But that was the extent of my friendliness. They were not to be our friends, they were the competition. They were the people who may even draw us into a ruthless bidding war for a home we didn’t really want but would be so desperate to buy because we just can’t stand the upheaval of house hunting any longer.

After thoroughly taking in the closets, Jaclyn and I calmly thanked the real estate agent for showing us the house. We drove to a nearby brewery with secluded seating where we could have a full-on panic attack.

As I saw it, our first order of business was to consider the real-world practicalities later, to hammer-out a reasonable but aggressive offer and get it submitted immediately. As Jaclyn saw it, she needed her husband and financial partner to get his damn head out of the clouds and think reasonably about the gravity of the situation.

To hear Jaclyn tell it, I took one look at the dining room, the pantry, the woodwork and the built-ins and, right there in front of the real estate agent, started speaking in tongues. At this point in our search, the house could have been built squarely atop a haunted burial ground and I wouldn’t have cared. I mean honestly, what’s a little poltergeist when there’s antique beveled windows?

Jaclyn’s closet from the other perspective, in our daughter’s room.

In our private seat at the brewery, Jaclyn recalled the closets. She said, “I saw your expression when you were standing in there. I’ve seen that look before,” she said with a shiver. “The look that says, ‘we’ll just need to fix this one little crack in the plaster’ and we end up gutting the whole house to the bones and adding a new foundation and a helicopter pad.”

She had a point. The closets did need attention. Ideally, they would be completely redone. My first thought was, it wasn’t going to be that big of a deal: A couple weekends of work and spools of electrical wiring and that’d be it. But then I also had a track record of allowing these projects to get away from me, of blowing through deadlines and demolishing reasonable budgets.

I conceded, “Okay,” I said. “Yes, the closets need work. But imagine,” I said, painting in the sky with my hands. “Imagine building a closet the way you want it.”

I could tell my illustration had hit home. She seemed on the verge of tears. So I went in for the kill, “Your own closet. Maybe even lined with cedar. Who knows, on Sundays you can hide in there and pretend like we’re rich.”

We moved from our apartment in Minneapolis under extraordinary circumstances. The weeks before we moved, everything in our apartment building seemed to be going straight to hell. The apartment two stories below us which had a history of swarming with either criminals or cops was now being frequently raided by the police. From the apartment above us came muffled screams and hours of sobbing, hysterical fights from a couple that was alternately falling madly in love or trying to kill each other. Gallons of brown water started streaming through our bathroom ceiling.

The owner of the complex had begun a number of construction and repair jobs, all of which involved heavy equipment and furniture spilling into our various communal spaces. I came home one day to find an impressive stack of lumber and bags of cement mix in the laundry room. Furniture from the foyer and equipment from the dismantled exercise room had been stacked up in the storage room for bikes. One evening I returned from work to find the better portion of a sectional sitting on its side in the spot I’d rented to hang my bike.

In part, the sudden unraveling of our Minneapolis situation could be blamed on a shift in perspective. Before we discovered the house in Saint Paul, the less glamorous features of apartment living was just something we lived with, albeit begrudgingly. But the moment our offer on the house was accepted, everything changed. We were officially “in transition.” So, what before was just a series of mild irritations was now ratcheting into a full-blown assault on our family unit. The building’s “vibrant community of characters” now seemed like a den of sociopaths. We could feel the walls squeezing in, as if the building itself was furiously working to expel us from its bowels.

And then, rumors about a COVID shut-down in the Twin Cities suddenly solidified into a certainty. A deadline was announced: A lockdown for the entire state of Minnesota was set for a week out.

Handiperson being eaten alive by her pants

We had never faced a total shutdown before. Judging from the sudden scarcity of toilet paper and Mountain Dew in every supermarket, neither had the rest of the country.

There was no telling what it would be like. But I imagined the worst, conjuring images of a post-apocalyptic wasteland: of wild elk wandering around downtown. Of roaming packs of wolves that hunted the elk and people. I imagined trees growing in the middle of I-94. In such a wilderness rental companies certainly wouldn’t be lending moving trucks, and we’d likely be quarantined to our apartment. The thought of being trapped in our old apartment while our neighbors were collectively losing their shit and our new home languished vacant, it was just too much.

Consequently, our timeline to move shrunk from what we’d planned—a leisurely haul spanning a couple weeks—to fleeing a war zone amidst an aerial assault.

Minutes before the shutdown, we rented a large truck. With the help of my unfortunate brother and sister-in-law, we gave hoist to our entire household in a single day and landed in our new home as an asteroid might explode into the Utah desert.

We put boxes wherever there was space. We stacked boxes on top of those boxes. As we filled the closets the hanger-rods sagged, creaking and threatening to pull loose from their tenuous housing in the lath and plaster. The walls—already bulging with cracks and fissures—seemed poised to cave in under this new burden of detritus.

The day after we moved in, Minnesota went into lockdown. But we were safe. We made it, just barely.

Like all Minnesota summers, the heat came suddenly. One week there was a solid pack of snow on the ground, and within 72 hours it was sweltering hot, with 80% humidity. Just as quickly, the closets transformed from meat lockers into sultry saunas, lusty with the fragrance of layer upon layer of lead paint steamed from the inside and sun-baked from above. By the time we were ready to begin construction proper, the closets were roiling hotboxes.

The problems posed by the geometry of the closets seemed to have been solved by the previous owners, but only in the most temporary sense. Hanger bars had been fastened to the walls without supports and with only one screw for each side. Their screws rotated freely in the crumbling plaster and I was able to pull them out by hand, along with a solid chunk of plaster, exposing the ribs of the lath underneath.

In addition to their supernatural ability to amplify the winter and the summer’s most unattractive mood swings, the closets suffered from a variety of other opportunities.

The bare-bulb pull switch lights emitted a dreary glow. The light had a knack of casting a head-shadow anywhere one might need to look for a thing. Most of the ceiling in each closet followed the roofline which sloped at a severe 52 degree angle so that the far end of the closets was only about three feet high—a space that, without proper planning, was not much use beyond filling with clutter.

I learned a lot about the previous occupants by dissecting the home they left behind—especially in unraveling their bewildering repairs and remodels. Judging from the disjointed cacophony of shelves, hooks, and hastily hung hanger rods, the previous occupants appeared to have tangled somewhat unsuccessfully with the awkward spaces created by the slanted roofline. I suppose they did their best. The stubborn angles made for a perplexing space. And the task of making them useful appeared to have proven insurmountable.

But something much more sinister than years of arbitrary, half-assed remodeling from conflicting sensibilities had unfolded in these poor rooms. The haphazard jumble of misfit or crumbling storage solutions betrayed a disregard for closets as strictly utilitarian and possibly even forbidding spaces in which the fewest most unromantic transactions should occur, if any at all.

For anyone looking for a place to hide something quick, shut the door and forget what they saw in there, probably these closets would be adequate. And that’s fine. A closet is actually a weird room. Unless you’re a gay baptist, or a podcaster, not many people spend a lot of time in a closet. Most people only visit their closets for brief, unemotional undertakings. Obviously, I feel much more strongly about a closet. I know, first hand, how a closet ignored, especially over time, can become a closet scorned. They have a uniquely effective way of exacting an especially cruel form of revenge for years of misuse and neglect.

That a storied history of residents seemed to have attempted to remodel these Minnesotan closets was one thing. That they all seemed to have limited or zero consideration for insulation was especially foreboding, indicating whomever should undertake the unenviable task of renovating their handiwork would surely encounter a bevy of skeletons.

Our house in Portland had weird, misshapen closets as well. Or rather, one long L-shaped closet that joined two bedrooms. It was too long to hang hanger rods, too narrow to hang clothes and still have enough space to walk through or to even get a good look at what was hanging on the rack. So, when I decided to finally fix, as Jaclyn noted, a crack in the plaster wall behind our bed—a project that spiraled into a complete demolition and remodel of the main floor of our home—the closets got the much needed zhuzh they deserved.

By framing a wall between the two bedrooms, I lost a valuable six inches of closet space but gained much more by redefining the small awkward space, returning it to its true calling as closets, rather than a thoroughfare. In the closet adjacent to the main bedroom, I respectfully steered clear of messing with the weight bearing wall. Instead I used it as a partial divider between Jaclyn’s half of the closet and my own. Rather than put drywall in and then hang hanger rods on the drywall, an arrangement I’ve never been fond of, I bored a hole through the framing on both ends of the closet, and the middle of the weight bearing wall. The hole was just wide enough to cork through a long hanger dowel. The result being a stunningly level hanger rod supported on both ends and in the middle by the solid (one could say overbuilt) framing from which, if need be, we could confidently hang a Chevrolet.

For the other half of the closet, I kicked out the wall two feet into the bedroom, turning a long, narrow pocket into a walk-in closet with ample space for hangers and shelving above and below. The lights I wired on each end of the space eliminated hard shadows that are common in so closets and which hinder the looking for and finding of closeted items.

After the remodel was complete, the two closets were not just closets anymore. Sure, we’d set out to turn them into more attractive and useful spaces and we accomplished that modest goal. But living with these new closets was another thing altogether. What we got, surprisingly, was a refuge—a space that made sense, was an efficient use of space, light and dimension. More importantly, the closets became a joy to enter, to use, to stay in.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from this and previous remodels: do everything you can yourself, but know when to draw the line and bring in the experts. In Portland, I was able to knock out the big dumb jobs like framing, insulation, and electrical work. Arguably I might should have left the enormous undertaking of building cabinetry and window seats to a hired craftsperson.

Like other jobs that needed doing, the cabinets and window seats involved a thorough calculation, a weighing of predictable costs of hiring out the job against my time and ability to do it myself. Multiply by my persnicketiness for the design and operation of the cabinetry. Subtracting the extra costs of mistakes, possible injury or dismemberment, general misery index of the job itself, and the marginal additional expense of purchasing raw goods without a contractors discount. One critical factor was the unknown cost of any specific tools needed for this one job. Tools that couldn’t be rented from the local tool library and that would likely never be used again once the job was complete. And for the cabinetry, the tools turned out to be a critical exponent with a unique solution—with an affordable month’s membership to ADX, a community workspace nearby, I had access to a gigantic well-lit woodshop full of heavy woodworking equipment like a router table, a full-sized table saw, planer, band saw, jointer, lathe, and an army of ratcheting bar clamps. Access to tools and a workshop decidedly tipped the equation toward a homemade project. Hence, I would build the cabinetry myself.

So while these odd jobs would take longer than if I’d hired carpenters and electricians, according to our hypothetical calculations we’d still stand to save a substantial amount of money in doing it ourselves. Multiple other jobs however—as with the windows, drywall, and molding—the equation swung dramatically in the other direction and consequently, we sensibly hired out that nonsense.

I’ve spoken with numerous people about our Portland remodel, or remodeling in general, and hiring out jobs always seems to be a sticking point. Many have expressed smug confirmation that I hired contractors rather than tackling all the jobs on my own. A true handyperson, they seemed to suggest, would have done all those jobs on their own. But there is a classiness in a handyperson who knows their limits. There is an elegant maturity in thinking dynamically about accomplishing the jobs which are beyond their immediate capability.

One time, an asshole coworker of mine even said to my face, “Gee, it must be nice having the money to just hire people to do your work for you.”

To that, I offered an anecdote about the time during the Portland remodel when I saved a ton of money doing the electrical work myself. I’m comfortable doing the electrical because it appeals to my randomly meticulous nature. Also, hiring out an electrician is especially expensive, I think because shoddy electrical work will most certainly burn down the house, killing everyone inside it. So there’s a danger tax which allows electricians to add an unspoken but appropriate surcharge to their work.

Pro-tip, always label your wires in the box.

But when the county permitter visited to approve and sign off on my work, he casually noted, “You know you’re going to have to replace all those outlets, right?”

I thought he was joking. Then I remembered, as a permitting officer, he was likely incapable of humor. I said, “No. No, I don't know that I’ll have to replace all the outlets.”

“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows dramatically. “You will. None of these are to code.”

I was shocked, I told him how they were all brand-new grounded outlets I’d just purchased from the local hardware emporium.

“That may be,” he said, not bothering to look up from his clipboard. “But for new electrical work, you need child proof outlets.”

“If these aren’t to code,” I argued. “Then why are they for sale at the hardware store?”

He shrugged, “Beats me.”

And so, obediently, I removed every single outlet I’d installed. I bagged them up, and took them back to the hardware store. The lady at the returns desk scanned the outlets and apologized saying, regrettably, they couldn’t accept any of the outlets as a return.

Because once you close up the wall, there’s no telling where those wires lead.

“Why not?” I said. “I bought these here and they aren’t to code.”

She said pointing to her computer, “Yes, I can see your purchase right here. But we can’t take these back.”

I implored, “Why?!”

She said, “Because they aren’t to code.”

My asshole coworker to whom I recounted this story, I don’t think they got my point. Which was frustrating because it was a simple point: While I likely saved a lot of money doing the electrical work myself, for every hour longer the job took me, for every outlet I wasn’t able to return, or any other costly mistake I made (like having to pay a double to have the county permitter visit our home a second time) it all adds up and cuts into the profit margin I saved by forgoing the work and expertise of a professional.

We like to think we’re saving a boatload of cash by doing all the projects ourselves. But what is more likely the case, with the time and money unnecessarily wasted on a learning curve, it’s probably a wash.

The drywall in the Portland remodel is a perfect example. For two bedrooms, two closets, a hallway, and a living room, each with four walls (or more, depending on the dimensions of the room) and ceilings, took a crew of two, sometimes three guys possibly months less than it would have taken me. That was starting from bare studs to installing, taping, mudding, drying with a small fleet of heaters and industrial fans, sanding, mudding again, drying again, sanding again, finishing touches, and clean up. And, their work was guaranteed. The experience was by no means a cakewalk. The crew was rude and they refused to flush the toilet. Mysteriously, they even drywalled over an outlet and when I pointed out the obvious bulge in the drywall the foreman noted casually, “Oh yeah, there’s probably an outlet under there.” Still, even in retrospect, the choice between hiring out that job and doing it myself seems about as difficult as deciding whether or not I should shoot myself in the foot.

So while on numerous occasions I’ve suffered conspicuously judgemental comments like, “Oh, you hired out that job? That’s…interesting.” I need to keep my mouth shut about how people who are unwilling to hire experts are obsessed not with saving money, but with saving face. Only the absurdly vain would be embarrassed to hire an expert or to fret about what hiring out a job says of their abilities as a handy person, or further, their willingness to allow themself to be fleeced by some contractor.

By “fleeced,” I assume they mean to compensate a contractor for their services rendered.

The work and love we put into our Portland home made moving from Oregon especially heart wrenching. Particularly when, after listing our affordably priced home, it languished on the market for months.

Perhaps out of nostalgia for our old home I soon turned my attention to renovating our closets in Saint Paul. Although, one thing we wanted to improve on the Portland prototypes: the shelving and storage systems. The shelving I made in Portland was okay. It was attractive, in a rustic kind of way, and functional. But this time, we wanted something really snappy. Something with drawers, maybe even lighting, and a balance of spatial solutions that a specialist was better equipped to conjure than ourselves. So we hired a local closet company to design, construct and install custom closet systems.

We met with a consultant and discussed real life details like, how much clothing have you? Is money an issue? Does Jaclyn or Nate wear a lot of dresses? Do you own a lot of guns? Or do either of you have an unhealthy obsession with shoes? And from our answers our consultant came back with designs that were surprisingly dialed in. Only a couple tweaks here and there, and we were set to pop. Construction on the cabinets would commence once we’d made the appropriate down payments. The final construction could commence once the closets were fully remodeled and they could make the final wall-to-wall measurements.

Demolishing the closets was an exorcism. It was the height of summer and I was broiling alive in our dark closets, pouring sweat and barely breathing through an industrial respirator. Through my fogging goggles, with the help of my faint headlamp I was mostly swinging in the dark. In the thick and rashy cloud of toxic dust I pulled down magnificent slabs of crumbling plaster and the gamey tangle of lath underneath. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse I suddenly uncovered a live wasp nest between the ceiling and the roof.

Stop-motion animation of ship-lap cedar planks going up in Jaclyn’s closet.

It turns out there was insulation in the walls after all. In fact, two attempts had been made to insulate the walls. First, when the house was built (probably around 1916). The walls were coated with a mangy mat of decimated coconut husks. These were nailed between the studs with furring strips and way too many nails. But once the furring strips were removed, these sheets could be pulled out in long, dusty slabs that, if jerked, bumped or otherwise knocked against something, would shake loose over a hundred year’s build-up of dust and dirt in an itchy scatter of thatch. Additionally, someone had blown-in this cellulose fluff which, once set free, tended to erupt in expanding plumes.

For the demolition rubble, I’d dreamt of building a large slide, mounted on our windowsill, and descending to a small dumpster in our yard below. Then I could dump the bucketfuls of our house right out the window. Alas, the only location we could put our dumpster was on the parking strip out front. So the lath, plaster, and other debris would have to be carried, bucketfull by bucketfull, downstairs, through the living room, down the porch and across the sidewalk to the parking strip where I could make a perfect spectacle of myself for the whole neighborhood’s viewing pleasure.

With the combination of working in sweat-drenched clothes and kicking up huge clouds of plaster dust, I was quickly covered in a surprisingly heavy layer of a wet claylike slurry. Our neighbors and gawkers driving past, took their sweet time to observe this clay man hauling bucket after bucket out to the parking strip. Shouldering every load into the dumpster where it kicked up incredible explosions of pulverized plaster and probably lead and asbestos and who knows what other toxins that were elegantly carried off in the hot wind.

After the closets were finished, I gave our neighbor a tour of the completed project . Apparently he and his kids had been attentively following this ugly odyssey and were quite curious how the new additions had turned out.

Jaclyn's closet was lined with lap planks of red incense cedar that smelled absolutely divine. There was a built-in vanity with a small desk, mirror, and plenty of light. My closet was a bit more spartan, with more open cubbies and three short hanger rods: One was for the dressy clothes that I never wore, another for clean clothes, and a “limbo rack,” for worn clothes that were neither clean nor dirty enough to wash.

Our daughter's closet was a bit of an oddball as it had a window. Her shelving system was not as luxurious as the custom-built setups with which Jaclyn and I spoiled ourselves, but it could support far more weight than should ever be required of closet shelving. And it was on an adjustable tract that could be raised as she grows.

The devil is in the details:

I promised my neighbor I was not going to attempt anymore huge remodeling projects, at least for the next fifty years or so. He agreed, noting that he’d also reached the end of his rope with remodels in their home.

“Actually,” he said. “We’re not taking on any more projects either because we’ve decided to move next year.”

This was big news, especially since we shared a driveway and, miraculously, the closet project hadn’t soured our relationship, at least not completely. But, he noted, they weren’t looking forward to selling their home. There were the thousands of little odd jobs they’d have to accomplish to make it market ready. And then they’d have to move all their stuff into storage for the staging, and there were the showings and he had no idea where they were going to stay while all of this was going on.

A year later, after my mom and dad bought our neighbor’s house, I found myself standing in the closets of their empty home about to take the maiden swing at a plaster wall in the first of four large closets I decided needed remodeling. It was the height of summer.

Noticing the framing hammer and crowbar in my gloved hands, I mumbled through my industrial respirator, “Well, shit.”