Home Improvements

Wow. These pictures have waited a little while.

We decided to buy the home we are living in currently. We knew that we would be involved in some improvement projects over the next few years. Most will be minor and involve things like paint. Perhaps a few will be on a larger scale.

Our first weekend in the house after our things were delivered, we embarked on our first project. In our master bedroom, the closet was originally a dressing room with a double closet. At some point the closet doors were removed, and a wire shelf ran along the length of the double closet. This shelf was placed in a manner making it a waste of some of the space up toward the ceiling. The wire shelf was also the hanging bar as there was no bar running under it. The shelf was no longer level from holding the weight of everything that was stored on it as well as hung from it. Trent and I decided to make the closet more efficient and bought a kit at Lowes. We thought it would one of those Saturday afternoon projects that would take us most of a Saturday afternoon into the evening, and we would be able to put everything away.

What started as a Saturday afternoon project, involved at least one more trip to Lowes, two to IKEA, a couple of phone calls for estimates from a professional, and 3 days. However, all is well that ends much better than I imagined.

When we started, we took everything out of the closet (some boxes were still not unpacked yet). It turned our room into a disaster in which we could barely get around. We had to hang Trent's suits in the hallway closet so that he could get ready for work that Monday before we finished.

We started pulling the old shelf etc. out and patching and repainting the drywall. When all of that was done and dry, we realized we could not put the new closet system up like we had planned. The result of all the weight on that wire shelf was not only a tipping shelf; it had pulled the dry wall away from the studs slightly. Trent determined there was no way we could put up a new system with dry wall anchors and have any reason to think it would hold up. That meant a trip to Lowes to take back the system we could not use and to look through all their options. This was followed by the first trip to IKEA. We looked at their closet options and even took a pamphlet for the Stolmen system. Everything on display was either too complicated or not what we thought we wanted. We went home discouraged, and this lead to research and phone calls to closet contractor types. I looked at the Stolmen pamphlet again and did a new set of measurements. Afterward, we felt that we really needed to go back to IKEA and give the Stolmen system another look. I designed a typical (and useful I might add) 25/25/50 configuration and figured out what parts we would need to accomplish this and whether the measurements fit. Everything we needed was in stock, and the kids loved the extra trip to IKEA. They have a play center the kids can play at for up to an hour while mom and dad shop. If the center is too full, the kids get coupons for a free ice cream cone. Either way is a win as far as the Warner kids are concerned. We went home and began the process of putting it together. We finished the next evening, and now, two months and some later, I still really love my closet. It has a real walk in closet look and feel. It is so much more useful. No more wasted space. In fact, if Trent would take his Coast Guard legoes into work, I would still have empty shelf space. We went into it thinking that this would at least make it workable. I came out of it really liking it.

Trent took what I conceptualized and made it happen.

I even helped