Did you see my office redo? Pristine and perfect. Everything in it's place. You probably think I have this everything has it's home, home office. Well, let me set the record straight. It's a total fucking mess. Seriously?! I write my own blog, I am a columnist for 2 online publications, Co-Chair for Princess Project of SF not to mention I am a registered Yoga Teacher and most importantly, the Social Media Editor for Beauty Army.
Most of this was inside the closet!!
Can you believe all this crap fit into a traditional guestroom closet? zomfg. Home Depot stat. My intention was to buy a gallon of white paint and some new mounts; paint, reinstall and done. Until I ran into the ClosetMaid rep. A few trips (3) back and forth to satisfy my creative genius and I had an answer to the dreamy closet I now call an extension to my office.
It started simply but doesn't it always. There was a shelf mount in my office closet that was coming out of the wall. After speaking with @MsPrettyful one Sunday, I made the decision to just tear in and fix the shelf before it falls down. I want to state for the record the reason the shelf was pulling out of the wall was because the builder used 'used' parts which were damaged. The clips were not able to expand on the inside of the drywall as intended because they were bent from their previous use and then hammered into the exterior of my drywall, leaving a 1" by 1/4" gash that I had to repair. Pure laziness on their part.
By removing the closet doors, I actually gained access to an additional 40% more space. The reason being: These doors slide one behind the other, so you can only access one side at a time and never access the full center of the closet. Removing to doors also gives the illusion that my room is about 20% larger than it actually is, partly due to the open concept partly due to the vivid white paint.
I moved the original shelf 8" closer to the ceiling knowing I need to leave space for the fire sprinkler. Note: per fire code, your top shelf, when near a fire sprinkler, must be open-style shelving so water can flow down through the shelf and extinguish the flames. Using a new, stronger and more flexible-growing mount system, I added a second full length shelf, a shelf to hold my printer and the most amazing 4 basket system for all of my beauty products; 2 baskets for me and 2 for Beauty Army. I was super excited to use this flexible system because it allowed me to keep our Sterilite 4 draw storage and build around it to my specific needs.
ClosetMaid makes several different size shelving and mounts to easily fit your closet. I chose 2 different main horizontal mounting brackets to fit my specific closet width and 4 shelf mount brackets which were 6' long, each. I was able to space the 4 brackets to my specific needs due to the design of the main mount; the basket set needed 21" separation for the support arms and my printer required 16". Easy peasy. Forced to purchase two 6' shelves, I used my Dremel to cut 7" off of the second full length shelf that I was installing and customize a piece to use as a printer shelf; it only requires 22".
This closet organization forced me to stop treating that space like a junk drawer. I purged 3 bags of clothes, and tossed a ton of crap. Now everything really does have it's own place.
Have you been able to convert a wasted space?
Share your success!
xoxo