Easy DIY Closet Shelves & Bifolds to French Doors

Last time we shared the home office saga, this was the current view…

It’s taken a lot of planning, building, and painting to finally reach this point.

But then what’s the point of building handy dandy office closets without some handy dandy shelving?

And also doors?

We got a couple more of our favorite bifold doors that we’ve used before on our laundry room and master bedroom closets.

But we wanted them to feel a little more grand this time by converting them into real French doors.

UPDATE: Want to check out the home office final reveal?! See it here.

How to Convert a Bi-Fold Door to French Doors

If you ever want to do turn a bifold door into a pair of French doors, it’s super easy to do.

1. Unscrew the hinges in the middle of the doors. (We LOVE these French bifold doors and have them in our laundry room and master bedroom closets too.)

2. Attach 4 hinges on one side of each individual door (8 hinges total for the pair of doors). We used these hinges.

3. Screw the hinges to the door frame, making sure they are hung at the same height.

Done! It’s really so simple and took all of 10 minutes. Just make sure those hinges are swinging the correct way. We almost made that little mistake. 😉

How to Build Basic Closet Shelves

Once the doors were installed, we whipped up the shelves. These DIY shelves are very easy to build using just plywood and some 1×2 boards.

If you already have wire shelves in your closet, you can use a similar DIY wood closet shelf overlay to disguise the wire ones in place.

Easy DIY Closet Shelves

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Supplies

• 1×2 boards
• 1/2″ plywood
• Stud finder
• Power drill & bits
• Tape measure
• Pencil
• Level
• Wood screws 
• Circular saw

Steps

1. Robert measured and marked where we wanted the shelves’ placements first. (We made them 24″ apart.)

2. Using a level, we drew a line on the wall for the shelf placement and marked the studs with a stud finder.

3. We ripped down the plywood at this point with a circular saw too.

4. And we cut the 1×2 boards to the length we needed.

5. To make the shelf braces, we used wood screws to attach the boards to where we marked on the wall on the sides and back of the closet.

6. We trimmed the plywood pieces as needed to fit them on top of the 1×2 braces and painted everything Benjamin Moore Chantilly Lace to match the walls.

We busted out our masking liquid trick for painting the doors Benjamin Moore Wrought Iron too. (You can get the masking liquid here.)

I’m DYING to organize these closets now! Mainly because the rest of our house is a hot MESS.

See beyond those doors? It’s not pretty. Does your house go coo-coo during a room renovation? Ours does every time.

I plan to cut down some large PVC pipe for that very top shelf to have makeshift compartments for seasonal floral stems. That probably makes no sense right now, but I can visualize it in my head.

Here’s where we are on the home office to-do list now:

Office Makeover To-Do List:

• Build pair of closets
• Install double French doors
• Paint walls & ceiling
• Install closet doors
• Build closet shelving
• Move air vent
• Paint doors
• Install lighting
• Hang art
• Hang curtains
• Assemble furniture
• Paint cabinets
• Decorate & style

If you want more ideas and inspo for jazzing up closets, you can see them all here.