Thursday, May 26, 2011

Closet Upgrade

So, it was a well known fact that our house was a fixer upper when we bought it.

Among the many other offbeat things we've encountered in our never-ending adventure of fixing up this ole' fossil, the guest bedroom closet had no sort of closet system whatsoever. No shelf. No rod. Which didn't come as a surprise to us, really, considering the state the house was in when we were handed the keys.


So, this past weekend, we decided to rectify that little situation, especially since storage space will be a premium now that we've got a little one on the way (and we've got to clear out a whole entire room for the future nursery - more on that later).


Obviously, a closet without any sort of closet system doesn't really amount to much. As you can see, up until this point we had just thrown stored random stuff on the floor. Classy, right? (it does have doors, they were just removed before I snapped this pic)

To make every inch of space count in this closet (the largest closet in the house, by the way), we needed to add storage space to the walls.


So, once trip to Lowe's and $60 later, we came home and got to work.

We decided to go with wire shelving because 1) It's decently cheap 2) It's a rod + shelf system in one 3) The shelf won't collect dust and 4) It's pretty easy to install (and no painting required!).

First we decided where we wanted the shelf/rod to go...


Then Tom checked for studs (we were actually pretty worried we wouldn't find any, haha! But we did - thank goodness!).


After marking where the studs were, we took the back hooks (that attach the back of the shelf to the wall), and Tom drilled each one in halfway on just the bottoms, so we could then slide and then snap the shelf in coming from the top, and Tom could finish securing the hooks into the wall (and since we were securing them into the studs, no anchors were necessary - score!).


Then we realized that we bought the wrong shelf support rods, and frantically ran back to Lowe's to buy the right ones (which were cheaper anyways!). We decided that we wanted this shelf to be super-sturdy (since it was so long and would be holding lots of stuff), so instead of putting support rods every 3 feet like the instructions said, we decided to just go ahead and stick one into every single stud. So instead of using 3 (like the instructions told us), we ended up using 7.

It was a simple process of drilling in the 7 support rods, and we were done!


Boy, are we glad we used 7 support rods! The shelf is sturdy, and now I won't have nightmares of it crashing to the ground in the middle of the night (and taking the whole wall with it!).


And as soon as that baby was in there, you can bet your bottom dollar I was filling her up with all sorts of stuff (namely our winter clothes - our master closet is so tiny we have to rotate our clothes every season). And there is still a bit of space for our guests to hang up some of their clothes (and even stash away their suitcases in the space on the floor).

All-in-all, we love it. It was a super easy system to install, and we couldn't beat the price and functionality of it. While it may not be the prettiest closet system in the world, it definitely gets the job done (and on the cheap, too!). Now we can really start cleaning out the future nursery!

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