Inexpensive Custom Shelving for a Kid's Closet

by Gretchen

$70

Easy

My youngest son's room has a tiny walk-in closet that was woefully underused for the first couple of years that we lived in our house. There was a clothes rod on one side and a single shelf on the other. The room it opens into is relatively small, so we wanted to keep as much space open for play out there as possible, which meant finding a way to take fuller advantage of the closet space. Before we redecorated his room, we had built a Montessori inspired shelf to hold all his toys out in his room, but now that he was older we wanted to leave that area available for lying down and reading books or pushing toy cars around.

inexpensive custom shelving for a kid s closet

Here's the emptied out closet before we started. I priced out some ready made shelving systems and was shocked at how expensive they were. We reasoned that we didn't need anything super fancy in here, so why not just use cheap stained wood and be able to put the the shelves exactly where we wanted them?

First we painted the dingy white walls a dark blue (paint we already had on hand that I thought would be a fun contrast to the green paint in his room (ignore the glimpses of green you get in these pictures; I had to blow it way out to get the closet to show up; it doesn't really look like that).

And then the shelves! We cut 1 x 4s to size for the brackets for the shelves to rest on and nailed them directly into the studs. Then we used stained 1 x 12s for the actual shelves. On one side it's all shelves for books and toys floor to ceiling.

And on the other side there are shelves top and bottom with a bar for clothes in between.

There was no light in here, so we bought this light from Ikea. It just plugs into the wall; you can read here about the solution we found so that we can operate it with a wall switch instead of plugging and unplugging constantly. All told, we spent under $70 for all the shelving in here, and now the space is so functional!