In the process of renovating for the kiddo to have his own apartment space on one side of our house, we needed to create a hallway for him thru the utility room. I didn’t want it to feel like you were walking thru the utility room to get to the rest of his apartment. To do that I ended up making these shoji style sliding screens my way.
First I had a great handyman closet in the furnace and hot water heater, this is the before picture.
Here it is all framed in.
Here it is all closed in….waalah!
It just disappears! On the other end is the washer and dryer that we share the use of with the kiddo, but I wanted to hide the laundry area.
Sorry about the blurry picture! No one wants a laundry room in their hallway. I decided to try to hide it in the most economical way possible and that’s when I thought of shoji type sliding screens, but how to implement them? First I bought those $20 wood framed screen doors from lowes.
Then I removed the screen from the door and bought some fabric for one side.
Which I stapled on, then I bought one more painting drop cloth from lowes and stapled that on the other side.
Next I took some burlap ribbon and stapled that all around the edges on both sides.
The next thing was to add wheels to the bottom of the two screens.
Molly got really bored in the middle of this project.
We added big hooks to the top of the screens. Then we took two galvanized plumbers pipe(like we did on our other sliding doors) but ran them from wall to wall. like this.. They are attached to the wall with connector plates (which are with all the plumbing supplies). When you purchase these pipes at lowes or home depot, they will cut and thread them for you there.
Here they are.
They slide back and forth easily and they make the laundry room go away like this!
Laundry room…..
No laundry room!
The doorway that goes to the rest of the kiddos apartment is in the middle of the laundry room and the closeted furnace/hot water heater.
We finished off the closeted furnace/hotwater heater with hobby boards and tongue and groove boards to make it look like this. (and then of course painted it.)
Behind the door is where his library is.
I love making all the utilities disappear! TA DA! It’s a hallway!
The materials were,
2 wood framed screen doors
4 wheels
4 large hook eye hooks
2 galvanized plumber pipes
4 connector plates to screw the pipes into
Burlap ribbon
a couple yards of fabric
1 painters drop cloth
and some staples
I hope you enjoyed my shoji screen trick!