New Year, New Closet Pictures!

Closets are one of my favorite projects to dig my hands into. I love them because unlike a garage or basement, a closet can typically be completed in a single session. Gotta love that instant gratification! I also love working in and redesigning clothing closets specifically, because you interact with your clothing and your closet every day, at least twice. So when you improve that space, it has an instant positive impact on your day-to-day life.

After more than ten years in business, six years living in this house, and designing literally hundreds of closets for clients, I finally gave my own closet some love and redesigned it and I'm about to reveal the before and after pictures right here on my blog...

Ok, to fully understand what we're dealing with, you need to know the size of the space before you see the photos. Our closet is a rectangle, about 6 feet by 8 feet, with the door on the short end. That's it. Here are the photos:

This one is the "before" (pretty obviously eh?) You can see from the doorway that Christmas Boy's clothing is along the left long wall and he has a bit of hanging space for shirts on the left half of the back wall.

My clothing takes up the right long wall and about 2/3 of the back wall on the bottom. Sweaters are folded just above the hanging clothes, and those four lumps at the top of the back wall on the shelf are my Butler Bags, the hanging shelf below them holds another orange briefcase, travel toiletries case, and a stuffed turtle I got on my first birthday. You can also see that many of my shoes are stored on the shelf above my hanging clothing on the long right wall. The ones that don't fit up there are under the clothing in a shoe rack (hidden) and they are overflowing onto the floor. (check out the Ann Roth pink espadrilles)

You can't imagine how tightly our clothing was stuffed into this space! I had been dreaming of making it over for a while, but this year I decided to go ahead and do it, and what better time than NOW, when The Container Store is having their annual 30% off Elfa sale?

Here is a photo of the closet after we emptied it, which took about 15 minutes:

This configuration, with two single shelf/bars down each wall, plus double hang on the back wall gave us about 28 linear feet of hanging space and 28 linear feet of shelf space. We assume this is the closet system that the builder installed in our house when it was built 25 years ago. These are pretty typical of what goes into most new homes. They're functional, but they're not ideal. It was time for me to step up my game and treat myself to a killer closet fit for an organizing queen and her king.

Once I figured out my new design layout, I purchased the components from The Container Store and brought them home to install myself. The installation makes so much sense, because unlike the white wire shelves in the photo, which left holes all over the walls, the Elfa system only attaches at the top via a steel track mounted to the wall. The only holes you drill are the ones in the track and everything else hangs courtesy of gravity, off those tracks.

First, the tracks go up:

Track installation is easy. You just hold the track up to the wall, level it, and mark the locations of the pre-drilled holes in the track on the wall with a pencil. Then, you put the track down and drill small pilot holes where each of your pencil marks are to determine if you're hitting drywall or stud.

If it's stud, you're good to go. If you hit drywall on some of the spots (which you will) you just RE-drill that same hole with a 3/8 inch drill bit to accommodate a wall anchor. Once all your holes are the proper size, you tap wall anchors into the larger holes, hold your track back up, line up its holes with the holes in your wall, and begin putting the screws in one by one. I think I counted that all three of our tracks combined had a total of 28 holes. Once the tracks are up, you can put the drill and level away, because the next step is hanging the vertical supports, called standards.

Standards go up next!

These bad boys have a notch in the top that simply pairs with the track. You can move the standards left and right with ease, as they are not attached to the wall.

After the standards are up, the fun begins... adding your bars and shelves!

We began by hanging the shelves and bars on the back wall first. The vertical standards have notches all the way up, and the shelf brackets simply click into the notches. You can move them up and down as you see fit. This was the original configuration, but as we went along, I realized that I am simply too petite to reach that high for my hanging clothes, so in the end, I bumped all those shelves down about 12 inches, and now I can reach them all quite handily. I still need a step-stool to reach the top shelves though.

Once the back wall was done, we tackled the side walls and this is how it looked, finished but empty:

Those are gliding shoe racks on the right side. Each one holds NINE pairs of womens' shoes in just 2 linear feet of space.

And this is how it looks fully re-loaded:

I have room for all my clothes, all my shoes, all my purses, PLUS my Zuca Bag, my range bag, travel toiletries, two clothing hampers, and I'm sure some stuff I'm forgetting. Now, instead of having just 28 linear feet of hanging space and shelves, we have 32 linear feet of hanging space, 35 linear feet of shelf space, PLUS additional storage for all my shoes on the gliding shoe racks. Same space, way more storage. Now that's the kind of math I like. :)