This is a view of one of the two closets in the living room. They're on either side of the front door (which we never use). Mark (previous owner) used them for wood storage, as he used the wood burning stove all the time. Since we weren't going to use it, we eventually cleaned out the wood and removed the icky louver doors on each closet. Dirk came up with the brilliant idea of fixing up the closets so I could install more Billy bookcases from Ikea (the ones I use to stash my figurine collection inside of). I don't have any photos of the cabinets inside the finished closets taken yet, but will load them up when I do.
Until then you can admire how crappy the closets looked inside. There was yet more of that fake, cheap wood panels, which were all moldy down at the bottom from wet wood. This is the closet to the left of the door as you face it. It's holding debris from the other closet, which I worked on first.
And here's that closet. Underneath the paneling was a layer of some white plaster type stuff. (I'm not a home interior expert, so I don't know all the technical terms.) I had to remove that stuff, as well as the two layers of wall paper underneath, before reaching the wood laths used for siding. (House was built back in the mid/late 30's and they used this lath material instead of drywall.) This was such a lovely job - HA!
More debris on the floor. After getting everything off the walls and out of there, I painted on a layer of Kilz paint and another layer on top - either of Kilz or regular white paint, depending on how much Kilz I had left.
I also painted the floor white, which was kind of dumb since some of it scraped off when we put in the cabinets. But at least you aren't seeing icky brown tile around the bottoms of the cabinets, which is why I painted it white. We also painted the inside of the windows white since you weren't going to be able to see out them (the cabinets just barely fit inside) and no one would be able to see the printing on the foam sheets.
The inside of the closets were covered in two layers of this blue covered foam insulation. It cuts down on quite a bit of the road noise, as well as the cold/hot air. The computer table is next to the left side closet and it would get quite cold if you sat on the computer for too long. But not any longer.
And that's it for now, until I can take photos of the new cabinets. Until then ....