closet fail

Bad things always seem to happen when you least expect them. Like our recent closet failure. We were having a nice family Easter dinner when all of a sudden boom... boomboom BOOM!! The entire master bedroom closet had collapsed. My side is the left side, so now my husband thinks he has the right to tell me that it was MY fault, and that I have too many clothes.

Anyway, this leads us to designing an entire new closet. Seems one continuous closet rod and shelf that is 11 1/2 feet long doesn't work well. Who knew?

And of course this catastrophe had to happen right when we've already sunken money into a few other different household projects. So our new design can't be too costly. It's always tough to find that balance of good quality vs. least amount of money. Oh, and it needs to be done in a small amount of time, because pulling our clothes out of a pile on the guest bed won't work for very long. So I've come up with a few different options so far:

Closets to Go has a simple online design tool (with very few options) that lets you design a custom closet which they then ship to you to install. I chose this simple white setup with no drawers (turns out those aren't cheap - $461 for a set of 4 18" wide drawers and 3 shelves!) and it came to about $800.


Next I looked at Closet Organizers USA. I loved their color choices - Walnut wood and Oil-Rubbed Bronze hardware. But it was almost $1100 for this design.


My favorite website so far to design the perfect closet is Easy Closets. You can customize everything down to the 1/8 inch, add pants hangers and other cool stuff. I spent hours moving shelves around to the exact layout that I had imagined. They have the best options I've seen for the price. The closet I designed below, Espresso wood with brushed nickel hardware, came to $1276.
After my husband says no way to all of these, I'll probably try The Container Store's elfa system. I can't design anything online, I'll have to go into the store, which is probably ok. They say that they are cheaper than a custom closet, but here is a 74" wide design on sale for $718. My closet is 136" wide, so I doubt it. But we'll see this weekend.

And of course, my favorite store IKEA has a few options too. Like the ANTONIUS system. Looks pretty versatile, simple to install and adjust. And probably more in our price range. Here is a 124" wide configuration for about $264. Now that's more like it.