Closet Doors Makeover

We have giant, dated, plywood sliding closet doors on each of our bedroom closets.

For our closet makeover, I just took them completely off. I'll eventually replace them, but for the build, I just needed them gone. However, for our guest bedroom, I wanted to try polishing them up and see if I could save a little money in the other rooms with some elbow grease and an idea.

The first thing I attempted was- using spackle to make the door smooth.

It took a lot of spackle, and didn't really work...

After asking some skilled friends, they suggested Drywall compound instead. That worked much better, and felt a lot like frosting a cake. It took a lot of drywall compound to cover both doors properly, but it made a huge difference.

Next up, I sanded it down to smooth out some of the rougher spots.

Then I wiped down the dust and painted it. And now it was time to add the detail element I wanted to try. I got thin wood from the hardware store (similar depth to paint stirrers) and I wanted to create some faux panels with it to give it a little interest and definition.

This phase was a lot of trial and error.

First was laying them out and cutting the pieces to size.

Once I got the layout I liked, I tried to space them evenly across the doors.

Then grabbing the actual supplies I thought I'd need to do the next steps.

I did my best to get them equal on each door and level (well, my best without losing my mind, sometimes with these projects I find it's best to feel it out part way)

I used a combination of levels and square blocks to make sure they were hitting the corners at 90 degree angles. (yes, I know there's specific tools for that, but I don't have them yet so this was my cheap fix)

Next was trying to figure out how to attach them. My initial thought was wood glue...

Great idea in theory... but I didn't have vice grips and trying to get it to properly hold down in the middles of the door was hard.

So I got out the ol' nail gun and tried it that way.

It went well for the most part, but I did hit a couple snags because of the metal framing beneath the plywood surface. The most interesting one was this nail that just squiggled into place and broke off the corner edge:

The nails were too long, so I cut them on the back side. If they were more visible, I would have put patches over them (also for safety purposes) however, since it's the inside of a closet and wouldn't be seen or in contact with people, I left them.

And finally, it was time to paint, caulk, and re-hang the doors.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

*Note, I also did trim work which helped elevate the look, but that's lightly covered in the post about the guest room as a whole (linked here)