Do It Yourself Project #1-Closet Doors

Last August when my fiance and I moved into our first house we compiled a list of things we wanted to do to our new home. The first was to get rid of the old flooring upstairs. The second was painting. Somewhere between projects one and two we realized that we were going to have to replace our closet doors.


The previous owners of our house loved wallpaper, not that there is anything wrong with that. Unfortunately the wallpaper they used upstairs was quickly showing why late 80s style didn't last long. Along with the walls, in two of the upstairs rooms they had wallpapered over the closet doors. We figured that this was just another example of their passion for wallpaper and we planned to strip the doors prior to painting the rooms. When we did it became apparent that these doors simply had to go. The problem was that underneath this wallpaper was a dark wooden laminate that likely came with the house when it was built in 1985.



Off to Home Depot we went. When we arrived the real challenge of this project began. Our closet door openings we larger than the "stock" sizes they had at HD. OUCH, instead of $300 combined for stock doors, custom doors were going to be almost twice that.

Either I had watched too many episodes of Holmes on Homes or my frugal gene kicked in, but I left HD with the stock doors, some power tools and some trim with the intention of "Doing it Myself".

My plan was to frame in the closet door opening to stock size (the opening was about 1 1/2" too wide and 1" too tall) and hide the framing with some trim. Having only once before used a mitre saw I knew I could be in trouble, but I was up for the challenge. With very few mistakes along the way I finished my project in about a week (painting took the majority of the time) and frankly it turned out about 100X better than I expected.

Take a look for yourself:

In the end the project cost me about $475, so I saved about $75 versus buying custom. However, I now own a mitre saw ($79.99 reg $159.99) and a couple extra tools that were part of the $475.

Up next, replacing the laundry tub in the basement!