In our continuing efforts to make our house salable, Dennis and I undertook the “Great Closet Makeover” this weekend. We ordered the kit from a company called EasyClosets. They have a website where you can enter the dimensions of the closet and choose the components you want to use, then they ship it all to you. Our closet kit arrived less than a week after we ordered it. It came in 13 boxes with a total weight of over 400 lbs. We took out the old shelves and rods on Thursday, patched the holes, and put up one coat of paint. Saturday morning we started with the kit. The kit has vertical pieces that hang off a horizontal rail. Dennis was excited because he got to use his new laser level for the first time.

You can just barely see the red laser line on the wall and Dennis' hand.

It is a little easier to see the laser when it is stationary.

The level worked like a charm and we soon had the marks on the walls to get the rails mounted at the right height. Once we figured out how the parts worked together it went quickly – until we got to the longest wall. I had measured that wall 3 times before we ordered the kit, and each time got 101.5 inches. It may be 101.5 inches at that spot, but the walls aren’t perfectly plumb and we had about a quarter of an inch too much shelving to fit along that wall. It should be a simple matter to just cut some off, but this is a pretty complicated system with cam screws that tighten adjacent pieces together. But we were able to substitute one of the 3 sections along the long wall with a section that was an inch or so shorter and it worked well.

Tightening the cam screws.

Adjusting the troublesome shelves on the long wall.

Dennis had to use a hacksaw to cut 2 hanger rods a bit shorter. 


Notice the lovely wheelie bin worktable.

I seemed to spend a fair amount of time on the floor getting the cams on the bottom shelves tightened up.

Then we were able to use the longer section with a few adjustments. I think Dennis was secretly pleased that we had to make the adjustments because that gave him an excuse to use his fancy new Forstner drill bits to create new holes for the cams I mentioned earlier.

The Forstner bit ...

Drilling out the hole for the cams.  A factory-made cam hole was drilled out to use as a template.  The black line on the shaft marks the desired depth.

On the floor again ...

Dennis also had to shorten the cam screws used on the top shelves that link the corners of the room.  This was due to poor planning on our part, but we got it to work in the end.

Dennis wore out one hacksaw blade on this project.

With some creativity and adaptability we got the closet installed and it looks great. I love the shoe shelves. We even got some of our things back in the closet. 

We put a little piece of carpet on a shelf for Max.

Dennis has the righthand third and I have the lefthand two-thirds.



Not a bad weekend's work at all.