Botanic Bleu: Everything In Its Place

A Spring closet cleaning frenzy turned into a closet make-over
that took some problem solving to work around an 8" x 8" pine post.
With a little planning and organization, an existing closet now works better.

The little closet is behind the door on the left.

Welcome to the little closet that now works as a closet for

clothes,

account file box,

bookcase for projects and magazines,

and

a new space for L I N E N S.

Here's how we worked around an 8" x 8" pine post in a closet

to create a better, bigger set of usable wire shelves in the closet.

My closet had a tower of wire baskets that no longer functioned as needed.

After years of working with what's on hand,

the day (rather, midnight) came when the tower had to go

and had to be replaced with 20" deep x 36" wide wire shelves.

The new shelf system has four shelves hanging from two vertical supports.

Now, these new shelves may not look much different to you than

the old tower of wire baskets.

Here is the old tower for wire baskets.

At first glance, it may appear there was more space in the old tower.

The key, however, is USABLE space.

The new shelving system's advantages over the old tower are

There is minimal obstruction to the shelf space by the support brackets. In the old tower system, the shelf widths were only about 18", confined by vertical supports on either side. The new shelves are 36" wide with almost all of the space unobstructed by supports.

The new top shelf adjoins the existing old narrow wire shelf making the top shelf 36" wide also.

The new shelf system allows unobstructed use of the floor space under the shelves; whereas, the old wire tower cut up the floor space into two small sections on either side of the tower.

Do you see how the new design worked around the 8" x 8" pine post in the corner?

The new shelving system came from Lowe's.

The 20" deep wire shelves come in 4' and 12' lengths.

Somedays it is just your lucky day.

The 12' lengths were on sale,
and the Lowe's sales clerk used a super-duper power snipper
to cut the 12' shelf into four 3' shelves for me.

This is a much better use of materials and less expensive
than cutting off one foot from 4' long shelves.

The 20" deep shelves were hand trimmed on site

at home to fit around the post.

Of course, the left wall was not quite plumb, so each

shelf's length was custom cut to fit against the wall.

The pine post caused a problem by not allowing

the use of three vertical hanging supports mounted to the wall.

Instead, we used two vertical supports that went with the system

and one brace support next to the wall.

By putting the brace support close to the wall,

little space was lost to the brace.

To secure the shelf grid to the brace support,

we used cable ties to tie the two parts together.

More shelving was created by adding a new 12" deep pine shelf

above the existing clothes rod on the right side of the closet.

A custom cut was made on site to fit the pine shelf around

the structural corner brace of the house's post and beam structure.
Not visible are the slanted cuts in the pine shelf that made a good fit.

Ready to see what is on the new shelves?

European size pillows, bed size pillows, throw pillows,

QUILTS, extra sheets, quilted throws, mohair throws, and

empty pillow covers to change out how throw pillows look.

A close view of the top two new shelves

There's the blue checked European size pillow that had longed for a safe resting place,
next to the patriotic European size pillow
supported by the old wire shelf and the new shelf.

The new shelves easily hold three bed size pillows.
Behind the yellow floral pillow are two more bed pillows.
The two decorative throw pillows fit perfectly in the space in front of the pine post.