DIY Tutorial: DIY Closet Shelves

When we bought our house, it was “move-in ready”, which meant we didn’t have to renovate anything to move in. However as we lived in the house the past few months, we noticed things here and there that were fine to use and functional, but would have looked and felt much better if we improved them. This was the case with all of our upstairs closets - 5 bedroom closets and 1 linen closet to be exact. They had old wire shelves from probably the 80s - some were loose, some were installed at an angle, and all of them felt a bit grimy to the touch. Guided by my handy parents when they visited, we started with a guest room closet and stripped out all the wire shelves, painted the walls Benjamin Moore Simply White to match the rest of the upstairs, and installed custom boards for a clean, modern look.

Last night, we updated our linen closet. The Before and After look quite different but all it took was some white paint and wooden planks and boards.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to update your wire shelves (or old shelving of any kind really) to custom wooden shelves:

Unscrew all existing shelves and supporting brackets
Patch up any holes in the drywall with pink spackling (it turns white when it’s dry!)
Sand down any bumps on the wall with a pole or electric sander
Prime and then paint the wall (we used Benjamin Moore Fresh Start primer and Benjamin Moore Simply White paint) (optional if you’re fine with your wall color)
Measure and decide how many shelves you want what dimensions they need to be - you can have Home Depot or Lowe’s cut them to the dimensions you need, or cut them yourselves at home with a saw. We had HD cut our boards initially but found that their cutting was mediocre at best since we had some boards that we had to then cut or sand down ourselves in order to have it fit into the walls.
For each shelf, you’ll need to get 3 wooden planks to support it - the 2 side ones should be shorter than the shelf depth by about a third.
Once you have the wood all cut, the fun part begins. Using a level, draw guidelines or dots on the wall so you know where they should go.
Use a stud finder to find any wooden beams - you’ll want to mark where these are if you can since screwing into wood is much more secure than screwing into drywall. Mark the wooden beams.
Hold the wooden plank up against the wall, and drill into it and through the wall to mark where the screws will go. Drill directly on the wall again to make sure it went through.
Put drywall anchors in or if you are screwing into a wooden beam, then skip anchors.
Prep the wooden plank by drilling the screws into the holes so that the tip of the screw is just through the other side.
Now position the plank back on the wall and drill the screws into the wall completely.
Rinse and repeat for all the supporting wooden planks!
Slide the shelves/boards in so they sit on top of the wooden planks - and that’s it! If you want extra security, you can put heavy duty double sided tape between the board and the wall but there’s no need if you’re putting relatively light things on them.
Give them a wipe and they’re ready for some Marie Kondo organization!

Here are some process pictures:

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below! Now I’m going to repeat this for more guest room closets :)