Hi fellow DIYers,
Today I'm back with a fun, quick DIY project we completed recently!
One of the things that we didn't realize was happening until it did, was we had put too much weight on our closet shelf system in our bedroom until it collapsed one day lol.
I forgot to get a picture of it sadly but we heard this big crash one day and weren't sure what the heck was going on. Working from home, I don't go into our closet that often necessarily since most of the clothes in there are more work-related than anything but a few days later I went in there to get something and realized what the noise was! Our closet had collapsed. Whoops...
Thinking back on it, it was bound to happen lol I figure we had at least 500 pounds of clothes and linens stuffed in there! It led us to do a whole lot of purging that's for sure!
One of the first things I did in the process of fixing it was determining where the heck the studs were! The condo we live in has to be a pain in the ass, of course. They don't use wood studs, they use the aluminum high hat metal stud system. Not the worst but it makes for a really big pain in the ass when we are trying to figure out where the heck the studs are so we can secure something to the wall and stud without fear of it ripping down! Trial and error, poking holes in all kinds of places finally gets some results.
One of the other things I did was use a metal electrical snake to stick it in the wall to find out where the wooden studs are. A lot of places are supposed to have the studs 16 inches apart but unsurprisingly this wasn't really followed here. I think these are 2 feet apart but who's counting?
One of the ways to use an electrical snake to do this is to make sure that your snake is angled and very gently bent in the direction you want it to travel. They are nice, flat and low-profile so it's a very effective way to poke around inside a wall that isn't too expensive and can give you some good information still.
Now that I knew where I had my studs it was time to mix up the mud! Mud just refers to the joint compound plaster substance here that you use to patch the holes. I got this bag of EZ Sand 45 from my dad many years ago and it's still in use today! It's good stuff. Just grab a little bucket and some of the powder and your ready to get started.
There isn't any hard-fast rule of how much compound you need to use but I gauge it roughly for how much I think I'm going to need. This is a 4 inch putty knife here so I used about this much and it was a perfect amount almost.
The crucial step here is not to add too much water! You want the consistency to be about that of pancake mix or a little thicker. It doesn't take much water at all to achieve this! Something I learned the hard way but thankfully the compound is pretty inexpensive to get ahold of.
This is a good consistency right here. Not too watery that it's going to fall off the end but at the same time wet enough that it's not going to clump.
Wouldn't be a DIY session without our son being involved with me though! He gathered some tools to participate in the fun!
Up on the wall it goes! I didn't take any snaps of this process sadly but you want to put it on there with the putty knife and spread it several times. It needs to fill the holes but also not be a huge clump. The smoother you can make it, the less sanding you have to do later I learned!
It dried for a few days then it was time to paint! You don't want to paint it when the mud is still drying since it will obviously just fall apart and not look right. This was the part the little man loved helping the most with! He had a blast and loves participating in all of it. Thankfully had some clothes we didn't love on, he got a bit of paint on himself!
I think overall the closet now looks a bit better! The dark color isn't something I'm crazy about but we had a bunch of paint left over that we needed to use so I figured why not just use what we have instead of buy more stuff. No need to spend money unnecessarily!
It was an overall fun project, even if it was something I wasn't intending on doing. We got a lot out of it! We purged a significant amount of clothes between my wife and I. Hopefully we don't get back into a situation of having a large volume of clothes but things happen. Gotta go through some of the clothes again but we got the bulk of the stuff out!
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