How much does it cost to build a closet?

Today, we have another addition to our case study articles. The project we will discuss today is a fairly simple home modification, building a closet.

What is the process for adding a closet to a room? What factors affect the cost of a remodeling project like this? What are some pitfalls to avoid when you are building a closet? What is a good budget for a closet addition?

Let’s get to it!

Can I add a closet to my room?

There are many good reasons to add a closet to a room. For our client in Barrington, NH, this was a need for a place to hang his jackets. He had a large mudroom between his house and his garage. The mudroom already had a small closet, but that closet was where his washer & dryer lived. This left him nowhere to hang his jackets!

There was a large, unused open space near the entryway to the garage. He thought that might be the perfect place for a coat closet! But, would it be possible to make that happen?

What is the process for adding a closet to a room?

Our client reached out to us to see if we could create a closet space for him in his mudroom. When we assessed the space, we found that he had a 25-year-old home, with a porcelain tile floor, drywall walls, a “popcorn” ceiling, and wainscot paneling. The layout of the room and the finishes in the existing space were going to pose some challenges.

Generally, the first step in adding a closet is preparing the floor. Different floor materials require different building techniques. In order to build a wall, a piece of lumber called a “bottom plate”, will need to be laid on the floor and fastened down. A bottom plate can be installed on top of the floors when the floors are hardwood. When vinyl, laminate, or tile flooring is used, the flooring materials will need to be removed first.

In this project, we cut out a small section of tile, where the bottom plate would go, and we left the remaining flooring intact. We were then able to frame the walls for the new closet.

This closet needed a light, so we had our electrician add a light switch and light for the inside of the closet. He also installed an outlet on the outside of the closet, as a convenience for our client.

When the electrical work was done, we hung and finished the drywall inside and outside the new walls. We then sanded the joint compound and primed all of the new drywall.

Now it was time for trim! We installed the door jamb & casing for the bifold doors that would go on the closet. We then installed wainscot paneling on the outside of the closet (our client didn’t feel that it was necessary for the inside of the closet).

Because the room had a “popcorn” ceiling, we decided to install crown molding on the new closet. We installed the crown molding and carefully caulked any gaps between the crown and the ceiling.

After all the trim work was complete, it was time for paint! We filled all of the nail holes in the trim, sanded everything, then primed and painted the new walls, paneling, and trim!

The existing walls in the room were in good shape, so instead of repainting the entire room, we brought a piece of the old drywall to Sherwin Williams and had them custom-match the paint color to the existing wall color. Custom color matching is difficult and some colors are especially difficult to match, so we always warn our clients that the color-matched paint may not be perfect before we ask a paint store to match a color for us.

On this project, Sherwin Williams did a great job! The wall color was as perfect a match as you’ll see! When we were done painting the new walls, we could hardly tell where the old paint started and the new paint began!

Once the walls were painted, we installed shelf brackets inside the closet. These brackets supported a single shelf and closet rod.

We still had one accent trim piece and one new handrail to stain. Both of these pieces were oak, and we wanted them to match the oak accents in the rest of the room. We had Sherwin Williams color match the stain as well, and we were very happy with the results they achieved!

What are the factors that affect the cost of adding a closet to a room?

The size of the new room will certainly affect the cost associated with a renovation project like this. What has a larger impact on cost, though, is the details and finishes in the existing space. It is very time-consuming, and therefore expensive, to match the existing aesthetic details in a room.

This project may have seemed simple, but it was very time-consuming to match the paneling details, create oak accents, and deal with the popcorn ceiling. If the room didn’t have these elements, the cost for a project like this would have been substantially lower. In some cases, it would be possible to create a closet for half the cost of this project!

As we mentioned earlier, the flooring in the room can also make a difference in cost. Sometimes it can be possible to frame the new walls directly over the existing hardwood floors. If the floors are vinyl, laminate, or carpet, they will need to be cut out where the new walls will go. Porcelain tile is the most expensive to prepare, as porcelain is very hard, and it requires special blades to cut it.

Electrical requirements will affect the cost a bit. Commonly, homeowners will ask for a light to be installed in the new closet. Sometimes, this is simple to do by connecting to an existing circuit in the room. Other times, it will require running wiring from other areas of the house. This extra work will, of course, add to the project cost.

What are the problems with adding a closet?

Adding a closet is generally a pretty straightforward project. When walls are being removed, like in projects where doors are being installed in existing walls, or rooms are being expanded, it is important to calculate the loads the walls are supporting and create a framing plan to support them. When walls are being added to an already open space, as we were here, these considerations don’t apply.

One of the things to consider in these types of projects, though, is how the flow of the room will be affected. It is easy to plan out a new closet on paper, only to find that it feels much bigger in person than it does on paper. The new walls may disrupt the existing room so much that the new space actually makes the space less functional, instead of more functional.

Another big pitfall to avoid is failing to prepare the flooring properly. If you are attempting to build a closet yourself, installing the sill plate over an existing floating floor, like vinyl or laminate, can be tempting. Building in this way will cause the flooring to fail, as it will come apart at the joints because it can’t “float” the way it was designed to.

How much does it cost to add a closet to a room?

The closet we built for our client here in the New Hampshire seacoast area was approximately 3 feet wide, 8 feet long, and 8 1/2 feet tall. It had double 32” bifold doors (for a 64” door opening), a single shelf inside, and a single closet rod. We added a 4’ led light bar, a light switch, and an outlet. We built wainscot paneling on the outside of the closet, to match the rest of the room. We also added an oak handrail and accent piece to the knee wall we created, both of which were stained to match the oak accents in the rest of the room. The total project cost for this build was $15,000, including materials and labor.

The trim elements and layout challenges of our client’s mudroom made this a pretty complicated build. A good budget for a similar build in a simple room where we wouldn’t need to cut tile, build paneling, or install crown molding would be approximately $10,000-$8,000.