We were on a roll with cabinets after the big kitchen installation, so I ordered some shelves for our closet. There’s a big world of closet systems that I wasn’t aware of. I settled on a fairly inexpensive line from ClosetMaid. They shipped Ikea-style in flat heavy boxes. Unlike my previous experiences with Ikea furniture, these were made better and took longer to assemble.
Sam doesn’t get involved with things that come with instructions (or he has me read them and provide a summary) so I spent the day alone with my instruction novel and some hand tools.
After I assembled a few shelving units, I called Sam in for the heavy lifting. We stacked the units, leveled them and anchored them to the wall.
I got a slightly wider shelf tower for my side of the closet. I don’t mind folding clothes, plus I have more purses than Sam.
The Home Depot edition of the ClosetMaid kit came with some trim pieces that really jazzed up the otherwise cheap looking shelves. I’m a big fan of these embellishments.
Next, we added hanging rods and wall shelves. These were pretty simple to install once we figured out where we wanted them. (They also came with fancy trim pieces!)
Since my shelf tower was wider, the wall shelves had to be cut to fit. The walls weren’t square so we cut them at an angle. By pure luck, nothing on Sam’s side needed to be modified. The 4 foot shelves fit perfectly in the 113.5″ long space.
We weren’t ready to come out of the closet just yet. Since all the tools were out, Sam installed the fan coil. As warned by Terry, our thermal guy, the bracket assembly and entire fan coil itself had to be completely disassembled in order to install it. There were no instructions for this, so I turned away while Sam dismembered our brand new cooling unit. It went well, of course. The unit is in the ceiling now and we didn’t find any leftover parts lying around. We hope to have it running by the time things heat up in the bedroom. There is no hurry at this rate, as winter is still hanging on.
And since no walk-in closet is complete without a door…
We put a door in. After the umpteenth door saga and another hundred hours wasted, I ordered three 6’8″ interior doors from a place in Portland. We had to paint the doors ourselves because doors apparently don’t come finished. Luckily there was a break in the snow so Sam could spray them outside. We put them in the shop to dry. Of course the cats had to walk on the one black door and get dusty little paw prints on it.
Once the paint dried, Sam dusted off the nail gun and put the door in!
We still don’t have exterior doors on the building, but now we can say we have a door. Hopefully we’ll be experts at installing doors by the time we get to the more important ones.
diamondgapbuild.com 