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When the weather turns colder, it’s time to stay indoors more and get started on home projects. One project was to build a closet with a sloped ceiling in our upstairs loft.
Here’s how we did that – and now we have lots of storage room for clothes, shoes and pretty much everything else we wear.
Here’s one of our projects. He built a closet for a sloped roof line in our loft.
When we moved in here, there weren’t many closets at all in this house. So we have had to add closets where we can.
How to Build a Closet with a Sloped Ceiling
Above our dining room is a loft. It’s roughly 8 feet by 14 feet in size. It’s right off our master bedroom so we have a door from the bedroom into this area.
That’s not a very good photo, but I wanted to show the layout. Dining room below and loft above.
It’s really the perfect place for a couple of nice big closets. Which we sorely needed.
The black pipe is the stovepipe from the woodstove. I am standing at the top of the stairs. Earlier, I had painted the walls of the loft before Graham started the construction.
Once the closets are in and all the work is done, he will use his sawmill to cut a nice wide piece of pine. We will nail that on the wall from the ledge to the ceiling.
Then I will finish painting that bit of wall there and the whole project will be complete.
The first thing he did to build a closet with a sloped ceiling (a bit of a pain!) is to measure for the exterior walls.
Graham built the exterior wall out of 2 x 4 lumber, cutting them to fit the slope of the ceiling.
Since we had already bought the doors, we had to build the openings around the door measurements.
Note: Be sure that your closet doors are going to fit within your door openings. If you are out an inch, you can use shims. But plan ahead!
After the framing, he started to add the inside pine panelling on the walls. Then he worked on the electrical wiring.
We wanted to have one light in each closet. We also needed a light in the loft walkway.
The one closet has just the rod in it and there is enough room in there to hang all our hanging clothes.
Since there’s also a closet in the master bedroom, we now have enough room for the clothes we need on hangers.
Eventually, he will add the closet doors. Until that time, we just hung hooks and ran string along.
I found two bed sheets with casings, opened up the sides of the casing and ran the rope through them.
That will help to keep the clothes clean until we get the doors on.
And we will put down laminate flooring to match what is on the main floor – oak. It’s very nice and is so easy to maintain.
For the other closet, I am going to try to design it so we have space to put things like boots, purses, scarves, etc.
I will take my time with planning it so we will have room for all of our accessories.
The closet looks really nice with all that pine board. It’s going to look fantastic when we have this finished.
We also have a LOT of “other season” clothes. You know what I mean, we have basically whole wardrobes for summer and winter.
We do a lot of layering up here when it starts getting cold. As a result, we have lots and lots of clothes. So those clothes need a place to live in off season.
I’m thinking it would be great to have two or three shelves to run along the back of this closet. That way we could keep the off season clothing on the shelves there.
We could run the shelves around the corner, so that two-thirds of the closet would be in shelves.
And it’s a nice deep closet, so there should be plenty of room. This should take care of all the clothes.
Then, if we leave the other side more open, maybe we could customize some shelves there to hold the purses, belts, scarves etc. with all the shoes and boots down below.
Keep reading for the second part of how to build a closet with a sloped ceiling here.
Part 2 of Building a Closet in the Loft
This post was originally published back in 2009.
Our other Home Renovation articles:
Got a really UGLY staircase that needs fixing? Read about our Stairwell Transformation – you won’t believe the “Before” picture!
Here’s how we changed old ugly lime green (!) counters to look like Granite for under $150 – How to Paint your Counters to look like Granite
Is your house stuck in the ’70’s with ugly wood paneling. Here’s how to Paint Grooved Wood Paneling to completely change the look of your home.