DIY Closet
by Rebecca on 2009-07-29
Whatʼs the best way to bond with your spouse prior to the arrival of your first child?
- Take a romantic babymoon, complete with a spa package.
- Treat yourselves to a dinner at a fancy restaurant and order dessert.
- Remodel your master closet.
Clearly the answer is C. Yes, this is what we decided. Now, lest you think that we are completely unromantic, we did have a fancy dinner last weekend, wherein I accidentally ordered the most expensive thing on the menu (but at least the waiter gave us free dessert to celebrate the impending arrival of our baby.)
The master closet in our house was almost a dealbreaker. But since the master suite is on the second floor of our house, Iʼd already decided that this was the house for us by the time we got up there, and the master closet would simply be Dealt With in Due Time.
The problem was this: there was a hideous homemade shelving unit installed in the middle of the closet and almost no hanging space. The shelving unit looked like something made in a high school shop class. It was big, clunky, and useless for people like us who hang up their clothes nicely. (Sidebar: if you think that we have lots of sweaters and blankets to fold up on shelves, I will gently remind you that we live in Texas where I could probably get through an entire winter with one sweater, which would have a pretty good chance of staying neatly folded on the shelf through the entire winter.)
Our old home teacher who is a contractor was good enough to rip out the shelving unit for us when he helped us move in, leaving us with plenty of closet space to be designed just as we wanted. As Costco members, we were given the exclusive offer of a discount at EasyClosets where we could design our own closet according to our own specifications for a much more reasonable price than hiring someone else to do it. So, after much tinkering, measuring, sketching, redrafting, and soul-searching, we settled upon a closet design and placed our order with EasyClosets. Now, hereʼs my plug for using them again: after we submitted our design, William got a phone call from one of their representatives who wanted to make a few slight tweaks to improve our design because they wanted us to be completely happy with our purchase. Thatʼs customer service!
10 business days later, we received 12 heavy boxes of closet parts in the mail. (Shoutout to our good friends Paul and Erin who were kind enough to bring the boxes in for us because we were out of town that day.) We found two evenings free this week where we put together the closet. William did a fantastic job of measuring all the parts several times, so everything went up quite smoothly. And now we have lots of hanging space, lots of shoe racks, and just a very few shelves to use as we see fit.
(I put that belly shot in there because I know some of you are curious to see how round Iʼve become. Nothing draws attention to my belly more than wearing a red shirt with a giant silver butterfly on it.)