in the closet

Our master suite is THIS close to being completely done. Like for realz. We ran out of grout for the shower floor with about 2 square feet left to do which caused an extension of close to a week to order more. So in the meantime I decided to get our my dream closet operational. Since we moved in we had all of our clothes first in the family room downstairs, until our bedroom was fucntional, then on wire shelves in our bedroom. And on a borrowed hanging rack, and in Camden's closet, and...you get the idea, and it was literally driving me nuts. I knew I wanted a high end closet organizer system so I got a bid from California Closets. Um, hello? Over $3,000 was the lowest option, up to over $4,000. I don't know if you know this about me but I am hella cheap thrifty. I knew I simply could NOT spend that much money on our closet so I started looking at other options. Ikea seemed like a good choice (I'd seen them used by other blogger friends Petit Elefant AND Discovery Street), but I didn't end up pricing them out because their components were either too tall for our closet (our ceilings are 91" in there), or short enough but too deep (we don't have room for two walls of 24" deep shelves).

LONG story short(er), I went with Martha Stewart Closets from Home Depot. I paid around $650 for almost exactly what my California Closets bid was for. I did the work myself. And? I. Love. It.

Exhibit A:

Yeah, those are my shoes.

I know, right?

The rest didn't turn out too bad either.
I present to you,
HERS:

and HIS:

Excuse the iphone photos. Apparently I forgot how to use my real camera. But you get the idea, right?

The entire system is totally customizable, and everything "hangs" on one horizontal support bar. At first I was skeptical, but once you get everything attached it is really sturdy. There are two different sizes of shelves (24" or 35"), there are long vertical pieces (72") or short ones (48"), and the hanging rods are adjustable. You can buy the pieces individually or in "kits" to save a little money. I started with two "4 ft-8ft Deluxe Starter Closets" and a "Hanging Starter Closet". Then I just added a bunch more shelves. They also have other accessories like drawers, valet rods, belt/tie racks, and hampers.

The single most difficult part of installation (aside from fitting them in your car) is if you need to trim the support bar (as I did for "HIS" side and for my shoe section). The directions say to use a hack saw, but since I have workers here practically 24/7 I asked one of them to please cut them for me. Other than that it was easy peasy. I used standard sized shelves and then adjusted the hanging sections to fit, so that I didn't need to cut any shelves to fit.

HER side has a long hanging section (for dresses) with 2-35" shelves above. HER middle section is double hanging, and HER right section is all 24" shelves.

HIS side has a long hanging section (for my tall man's tall things), with 24" shelves above for HIS shoes. HIS middle section is also double hanging, and HIS left section is all 24" shelves.

My shoe section is simply two long vertical pieces with all 35" shelves. I got lucky in that the section I put them was 40" wide so I don't have much wasted space.

We definitely have room for all of our clothes, and then some. There's even room in there to have a little chat and a glass of wine. (Not that I'd know anything about that of course).

What do you think? Pretty awesome, huh? 

This post is totally not sponsored. Martha Stewart has absolutely no idea who I am, although Home Depot totally SHOULD considering how much we've spent there in the past couple of months.