Den Closet Shelves

After finishing all the painting in the den and the den closet, we decided to put up as much shelving as we could in the closet area. Here's the side of the closet where we wanted the shelves - freshly painted and pretty.

We went to Home Depot and looked around at what our options might be.  We decided on the Closetmaid wire shelf system - Closetmaid shelf system at home depot

We figured out that you can buy huge pieces of this stuff, and they will help you cut it down right there at the Home Depot -  It's a good deal cheaper than buying a bunch of smaller ones.

We needed several 3' pieces and several 4' pieces.  The staff at the Home Depot near our house is really awesome.  We almost always get fantastic service here.  I'm talking about the kind of service that you imagine little hardware shops gave customers in the 50's kind of good service. - so you'll have to pardon my occasional fawning over our local Home Depot.  This is totally the store all other Home Depots should aspire to emulate.  As with most things YMMV at your local store.  I forgot to mention all the help they gave us with picking out the proper paint and painting supplies in my previous post.  They went WAY above and beyond what I ever expect from big stores like this. OK, enough with the pants peeing over the HD.

So we bought a pile of 3 and 4 foot shelf pieces.  We also had to buy all the hardware to put them up.  Here's  what we got:

a bag of low profile brackets

12 2packs of shelf supports

and 4 90 degree shelf brackets

So, we got the new shelves home and started putting them up.  You can see the little supports under the shelf and the brackets on the front ends.  You have to make sure that you cut your shelves short enough to fit down into these little low profile front support brackets.

We put the 4' pieces along the back wall.  It took some measuring, and a level to get the lines on the wall where each shelf should go.  I drilled pilot holes into the studs in the wall.  Each shelf as 3 brace bars that attach to studs.  There are also tiny bracket along the back of the shelf that sink into the studs and drywall.  You can just about sit on these shelves they're so sturdy.  The brace bars come with drywall anchors, but I chose to sink them into studs wherever possible.

Some of the pieces were a quarter inch or so too long, so I had to cut them down.  I have a tiny stanley tension saw kind of like this one here:

stanley saw

The saw cut through the shelves pretty easily.  I took the shelves I needed to cut out onto the back porch and rested them on the stairs.  I let the end of the shelf hang just a bit over end of the stairs and sawed right through in about a minute.  It wasn't exactly like a hot knife through butter, but it wasn't too bad.

I Got a couple of the 4' pieces up, and then put up a couple of the 3' pieces.

I used a corner connector piece to add the side shelves at a 90 degree angle

Here's a pic of the shelves all packed to the gills with our stuff ... and things:

We have a TON of storage space in this closet now, and this is just half of the closet. The other half of the closet has the rack for the home audio system we put in, and another bit of shelving.  We'll be adding a coat hook system of some kind soon.

I'm not sure I would choose this type of shelving if I were to do this over again.  It was a good bit of work to put them up, and they're not going to win any beauty contests. The support bars that come down can get in the way. They are very functional though, if a bit industrial.  They make a similar system to this, but it uses rails. I thought these shelves would be sturdier than the rail style, but after putting them up, I think either style is probably just as sturdy.

We also recently redid the laundry / storage closet off of the dining room and made it into a pantry with a different shelving system that I like even more.  I'll post about that one soon.

Live well - Live Norman
P