Now presenting the latest in a series of posts by Sally Kohn— journalist and CNN political commentator, TED talk giver, and design aficionado—chronicling her adventures in remodeling. In this installment: There are many reasons to line a closet with cedar: it smells lovely, keeps moths away….and, as Sally found, it gives a hard-working but under-appreciated space an upgrade.
When my wife declared that she wanted me to line a closet in our guest apartment with cedar, the first thing I thought about was money. While inflation has made everything more expensive, the cost of cedar is really prohibitive. To wit, when I went to order the cedar tongue-and-groove needed to line the roughly 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-7-foot closet, it cost about $900. I doubt it’s the most expensive closet in the world, but still, it’s now definitely the most expensive closet in my house. By a lot.
Otherwise, let me just say, swallowing the price of the materials was the hardest part. The rest was just math. I used this calculator online to figure out how much wood I would need. I ended up buying 20 8-foot-long cedar tongue-and-groove boards to line the closet and had a little left over, but that was my intention in case I made mistakes. Also, I should note, I bought A-grade clear cedar. I could have used the knotty variety and saved a little money, but do you really think my wife, who didn’t think twice about wanting a $900 cedar lined closet, was going to settle for less-than-perfect cedar? No, I didn’t think so either. Plus, honestly, if I was gonna do it, I wanted it to look like it was worth the effort.
Installing the tongue-and-groove cedar was easier than I thought. I initially was planning to go width-wise and then when I realized how much extra work that would be, I quickly settled on a vertical orientation. It made the closet look taller, sort of like when I wear striped pants. And then I only had two hard corner joints to navigate rather than dozens. I glued each piece into place and used a nail gun to reinforce it. Like I said, the only tricky part was the corners. Then I finally had to get over my fear of my table saw and rip the boards that would squeeze into the corners. That was also made harder by having to cut the piece thin enough to wedge into the tongue/groove while not leaving so big a gap that it would be visible. I did the right side of the closet and then the left side—and then the back, so that I could use the back pieces to hide those little gaps. If you look closely, you can see a few spaces where I screwed up, but thankfully no one looks closely and they’re in the back corners that are mostly hidden by linens.
