Hallway Storage: The Broom Closet

While I love my little pocket office, its secure ceiling joists, and its pocket door, adding these elements separates the office from a fairly large, mostly usable, area of our basement. Nothing in our house exists without working for us, and this hallway is no exception. The freezer has been in its spot for years, and there is no chance it is moving anytime soon. If it does, it will be replaced by appliance movers. These are hefty!

So, I wanted to work around the freezer and make use of the old water heater position by the chimney. These really amounted to two separate problems that we were able to address with a lot of salvaged components and some left over lumber.  This is about the 6" gap between the freezer and the wall: a tight space to make something work for us!

The Broom Closet

The first half I worked on was a little pull out broom closet between the freezer and the pocket door wall. The pocket door wound up a little further into the office than I initially wanted, so this felt at first like wasted space I wanted to recapture. Having a little broom closet though is a huge bonus! Packing in pockets of storage everywhere helps us have a spot for everything that anyone can find.

I mostly built the broom closet by installing salvaged plywood as the wall cladding. This pushed the wall out far enough that I could use drawer slides to work the pull out mechanism and keep the door casings consistent downstairs. I had to install the slides onto the plywood before attaching it to the studs. Since I only had about 6" of space to work with, I had to be very strategic about where and how every piece went in.

Pegboard

Once I had the wall in, I had to build the pull out itself. I used pegboard and a simple wood frame on the back as the main base for the broom closet. The tricky part was getting it installed on the drawer slides. I cut two rails for it to attach to the slides, and I made the rails smaller than the slides, so the wood frame could fit around them. Because of a duct that runs through this hallway, I had to install these rails before attaching them to the pegboard.

With the pegboard framed and ready to hang, I wanted to build a box onto the hanging side as well so anything that fell off a hook would still come out of the closet instead of getting trapped next to the freezer. I used pocket screws to attach the back, top, and bottom through the pegboard and into the frame behind.

Finishes

With the new cabinet nearly done, all that remained was installing the front, finishing paint, and adding hardware. Above the freezer is a small cabinet set back several inches. With this broom cabinet, I lined the front to meet this cabinet front instead of lining up with the front of the freezer. The freezer cabinet is also a little narrower than the freezer itself, so I assembled the front of this broom cabinet in two pieces. One lines up with the freezer, the other corresponds with the little cabinet above.

I kept paint in the hallway white: this helps all the different storage pieces from the freezer to the salvaged cabinets I was about to move over as a cohesive unit through the hall. It all blends, and with no natural light in this little hallway, the light moves through easily no matter if it's from a hall sconce or light from another room.  The bronze hardware all coordinates in this hall, and it plays well off the raw brass on the doors and the light fixtures.

I'm already impressed at how well this little storage nook is working out for all of us! And I find it strangely satisfying tucking in a broom on a hook and hiding it away. It's a system that is both practical and necessary in our little house.