My wife and I bought our first house in 2016 and it took a year of convincing, and saving, to be able to move the fish tank to the closet in the dining room. We decided to upgrade from the previous 55gal wide reef tank I built a few years before. It was way too tall and tippy and just seemed like an opportunity to go bigger given the space we would be using.
Why is there a closet in the dining room?
It was originally a bedroom next to the kitchen that had the wall taken down to open it up into a dining room. The closet was left as is and though the storage was convenient we decided a tank would be more pleasing to look at. One stipulation was that we still needed to keep some storage space.
step one was visualizing the change?
I had already ran a separate circuit to the space above the tank for convenient electrical access and was going to have to move the switch in the image below to the wall on the right.
Next was the fun part Demo!
framed the look throughs
Painted. My wife is the artistic one.
Look throughs are done. Time to place the tank.
Display:
Sump:
I impatiently decided to start cycling the tank asap even though we still had work to do around the tank. Did my best to keep it covered and clean of debris.
Closet is 5' wide and the Red Sea Peninsula 500 4' wide. So we came up with the idea of putting cabinetry around it to get some uniformity between the kitchen and clean up the area. This also kept me out of trouble with my wife and left us a little room for some cleaning supplies and bigger kitchen appliances.
hung the lights from the cabinet above
Home Depot's designers did the cabinet layout for our space and left us a big piece of matching wood to cut to size for the hatch door above the tank for access.
This was the original setup of the tank
here is the current setup. I added a aquarium chiller to deal with the temp issues we were getting during the summer. I plan on adding a vent to the hatch as well within a months time.
Why is there a closet in the dining room?
It was originally a bedroom next to the kitchen that had the wall taken down to open it up into a dining room. The closet was left as is and though the storage was convenient we decided a tank would be more pleasing to look at. One stipulation was that we still needed to keep some storage space.
step one was visualizing the change?
I had already ran a separate circuit to the space above the tank for convenient electrical access and was going to have to move the switch in the image below to the wall on the right.
Next was the fun part Demo!
framed the look throughs
Painted. My wife is the artistic one.
Look throughs are done. Time to place the tank.
Display:
Sump:
I impatiently decided to start cycling the tank asap even though we still had work to do around the tank. Did my best to keep it covered and clean of debris.
Closet is 5' wide and the Red Sea Peninsula 500 4' wide. So we came up with the idea of putting cabinetry around it to get some uniformity between the kitchen and clean up the area. This also kept me out of trouble with my wife and left us a little room for some cleaning supplies and bigger kitchen appliances.
hung the lights from the cabinet above
Home Depot's designers did the cabinet layout for our space and left us a big piece of matching wood to cut to size for the hatch door above the tank for access.
This was the original setup of the tank
here is the current setup. I added a aquarium chiller to deal with the temp issues we were getting during the summer. I plan on adding a vent to the hatch as well within a months time.
