Media Closet II

The final chapter of our closet-fest involves the media closet. We described a lot of the plans in this post; here's what it looks like now. Pardon the hooptie composite, as we don't have a wide-angle lens to fit the whole thing in one shot.

All of the shelving is now in place. For the upper shelves, which will hold extra cables, games, and accessories, we cut down some of our leftover solid shelves to fit exactly. The Elfa pieces come in fixed widths and aren't meant to be cut, but with access to a big saw and a drill it's really quite easy to trim them and then re-drill the necessary holes so they fit on the brackets. The cut side remains unfinished, but if it's up against a wall inside a closet .. meh.

The counter-height solid shelf is serving its purpose well as a charging station, and the lower ventilated shelves are now housing virtually all of our A/V components, with plenty of room to spare. At present the cabling is a bit of a mess, but we're refraining from tightening that up too much until the component arrangement is more finalized. In particular, we need to put in a receiver to hook various pieces together and output to our soon-to-be-installed recessed speakers.

For cooling, we have installed a CoolComponents VS-HFB variable-speed fan with a temperature sensor near where the hottest components are likely to be, somewhat above the baseboard level. We don't yet need to run it, thankfully (and if we never do, all the better) but it's good to have just in case.

The "door" to the closet is just a white curtain for now. We were dissatisfied with the way the proposed framing for sliding doors was going to work, and are considering other options. Top on our list is a barn door of some kind.

Office Closet

For the Office Closet, we wanted storage for all of our office supplies, a home for our network printer and paper shredder, and a little room for guests to hang a dress or suit and maybe a robe or towel. Luckily we planned ahead and had the closet wired for lighting (again, an overhead light inside the door frame), electrical and ethernet for the printer.

To figure out what type of spaces we would need for office supplies and files, we laid out most of what we were hoping to stash. I spent about two days unpacking 15 boxes of office stuff and sorting through/getting rid of items. Here’s the pile of stuff we need to find other homes for or get rid of:

And the stuff that’s actually office or guest bedroom related (some of these boxes are even empty!):

Again, most of the shelves and hanging standards we needed were left over from New York so it took just a few additional elements and some major tweaking. We knew we wanted to repurpose a drawer unit that had been acting as a dresser and because of its depth and drawer extension, it could only go one place. The diagram:

Here’s the closet mid-installation (and Greg admiring our work):

And the final product (with a guest hoodie and robe hanging from door hooks):

More detail of the drawer unit:

The top four drawers hold office and design supplies and printer paper and toner. The larger drawers on the bottom have boxes for office-related discs and cables, wedding stuff including photos, and other supplies for house projects. Every drawer and shelf will have labels soon.

Close-ups of the closet rod for guests (now holding the tux Greg borrowed from a friend), and all of our files and photo boxes:

Bedroom Closet

We have decided on final resting places for most of our furniture and belongings in the house. After going back and forth, we decided on the small interior room as our Master Bedroom (until we tackle the downstairs renovation) and the larger/brighter front room as the Office/Guest Bedroom. Photos to come of our rooms as they are now.

With those decisions made and a windfall of Container Store sales and gift cards, we were ready to take on organizing our closets. We chose to outfit all four closets on the top floor (Bedroom, Office, Linen and Media) with Elfa systems. They are pretty easy to install, adjustable, and are super strong, plus we had a number of Elfa components left over from our closets and office in New York. Overall, all four closets ended up around $200 and they would have been about $1500 without the existing elements, sales and gift cards!

Our closets all have our 9' ceilings and we tried to utilize the height as much as we could. At 22"-30" deep, we decided shelves right above the door frames made the most since as we probably wouldn't be able to access anything higher.

We wanted the Bedroom Closet to hold all of our hanging clothes as well as our nice shoes. Because we’re trying to keep our floors as clean as possible, the more casual shoes are kept downstairs in the entryway under a bench. It took a bit of work to get all of the clothes to fit with room to grow but luckily we’re constantly paring down our wardrobes and Greg only has one pair of dress shoes. Here’s our illustration/diagram so we knew what to reuse and purchase:

And the finished closet:

Everything fits in so nicely. It’s kind of a pleasure to get dressed or even put away clothes now. Some of the highlights:
•a light inside and over the door frame to illuminate everything at night.
•room to grow… an extra foot of closet rod each
•those shoe shelves actually glide out!
•the shelf above Greg’s clothes will hold boots and shoes/bags that we don’t use that often