Past Project: Oct 2018
It was a Thursday evening in October 2018. The Special Lady in my life and I had gone out to grab a bite to eat and do some shopping. At home, a storm was brewing... The Christmas presents I had started to stockpile for the children had begun putting on some extra holiday weight while we weren't paying attention and the particle board shelf in my closet was calling out for reinforcement, but no one was around to hear it's screams. It was all too much for the shelf to take and it finally gave up the fight.
As the shelf gave way it took the clothes bar with it. I didn't know yet, but this beautiful surprise was waiting for me at home. Thankfully the kids weren't there to witness their Christmas gifts trying to escape their fate of being left in some other closet in our house for eternity.
Jokes aside, this closet was in a sad state of affairs long before the shelf gave out but, as is usually the case, it was never a priority to do anything about it. At the time this closet and 1 drawer in the dresser were the only spaces my girlfriend allowed my personal belongings to occupy in our bedroom so something needed to be done. And quickly! That evening I set to work with a tape measure and sketchup to solve my clothing storage difficulties. There would be a new closet organizer in my near future.
I toiled on sketchup for a couple hours to get a good idea of what I wanted out of the space and put together a material list for the project. I came up with the organizer you see in the image above(yes, it's a picture of a printout of the thing I designed in a 3D modeling program. I am disorganized and have absolutely no idea where the file is but I still have this printout in my desk drawer. It's just how I roll). On my way home from work the following day I made a stop at the big blue box store that overcharges for things but occasionally (read: regularly) forgets to scan all your items, and picked up what I needed to tackle this project over the weekend.
This all took place before the construction of my workshop so this needed to get done in a hurry so I wasn't occupying precious garage space if it started snowing. That meant that pictures of my progress weren't a priority and I needed to get my a$$ in gear or lose it. Even a few years of trying later, I still haven't gotten the boss to understand that garages are not a place to park your vehicle, they are for projects and toys. I'm not sure what she doesn't understand about this but it's definitely something I'll keep working on. But lucky for me I was able to slap these togeter with limited issues before I got in trouble for taking up her "parking spot"
I even broke my painting rule for this project to get it wrapped up and get my stuff back into the closet. I built both sections exactly as designedand everything wahs going great. I was on track to wrap it up before the weekend was over and all was right in the world. I forgot one small detail during design. When standing the tall section up in the closet, I realized that I didn't account for the diagonal measurement from top to bottom and I wasn't going to be able to get the tall section upright. Two minutes with a circle saw later and this was now a 3 piece closet organizer.
After hacking my hard work in half and securing the parts in place I added a new clothes bar and put all my belongings into their new home. It looked this good for about 2 days and thespace created by adding the cubbies and shelf up top were quickly taken up by other relocated items. Eventually the twin to this closet will need some kind of organization system but I've successfully put it off for three years so far so I'm kind of pushing to see how long I can go before the boss threatens to fire me at this point.
