Michael Holigan: Welcome to this weeks show. You may not find the boogie monster in the closet, but they can be messy enough to scare just about anyone. If you're having a hard time finding your favorite shirt or pair of shoes, it's time to get organized.
Al Carrell: You know Michael, almost everybody's got a least one closet that just won't hold everything.
M.H.: This weekend, we'd like you to size up your closet and take inventory. You can turn a closet catastrophe into a model of efficiency, so let's get started. One of the biggest problems in any size closet is finding a place for everything. There are the long hanging clothes, the short hanging clothes, the belts, the ties, the accessories, the children's toys, the sporting equipment, and the shoes. But with a simple, easy to install system, everything can fit and have a specific place. Colleen Monroe's with us today, from The Container Store, to try to help us out in the closet, and, first question, what's wrong with the closet? It's very big. We should be able to fit everything in here.
Colleen Monroe: Yeah, the owner's are very lucky, this is a large closet. But what's really typical of builder's closets are some items here that we can show you. We've got some wasted space down here, and it really ends up just being a dumping ground. It's the mystery pile of things that they don't know what to get to. Here we've got, you can kind of see the rod here is bowing, so it's really not taking into consideration the weight or the amount of clothes that will be hung on this rod.
M.H.: Colleen, what do you need to consider when you're building a closet or rebuilding a closet?
C.M.: Well, when we're tailoring really any space for a customer, what we want to think about is flexibility, visibility and accessibility. If you can't see it you can't get to it, and flexibility is really important, because, a couple of things may happen. Either their needs completely change or they grow and so having a closet that will flex and expand with a persons needs is really important.
M.H.: And what are some other areas that we have wasted space in this closet?
C.M.: Well, you can see the corner here. You've got about one square foot of wasted space in the back.
M.H.: Where the bars cross?
C.M.: Where the bars cross, exactly. See, you're wasting this part and that part of the rod, where you can't hang any clothes. So when designing a closet for the home owner, we'd want to make sure that you can really access that whole space and hang all the way to the corner of the wall.
M.H.: Our goal today is to transform three closets. One very small, one medium walk-in, and one very large walk-in. The hardest part of redesigning your closet is having to remove everything, but you need to start from scratch to begin the installation. Using the Elfa installation, the only piece that is attached to the wall is the top brace and everything else hangs from it, such as the shelves and hanging rods. It's a simple design, easy to install and modify. Just watch. Well, Colleen, the closet definitely looks a lot better, and it's organized now. Tell me what you did.
C.M.: Well, first of all, no matter the closet size, you try to include six basic elements. And that's the space for short hanging clothes, which are shirts and pants that are folded over a hanger. Long hanging clothes, like for dresses and things. Shoe space. Accessory space, ties and belts and things. Drawer space. And then shelf space. And we've included all six of those elements in this closet, and it looks great.
M.H.: Okay. Where do we start?
C.M.: Well, one of the first places, if you'll remember, this was long hanging space, but she was hanging short hanging clothes on it, so we made this short hanging space and then below it we made drawer space.
M.H.: Back in this corner we had a problem from crisscrossing rods, we had a lot of wasted space. How did you correct that?
C.M.: Well, when we designed her closet, because we were customizing it for her needs, we went ahead and just...she's hanging all the way to the wall. And rather than hanging on this side, we chose to add some shelving here for some folded sweaters, so it really is visible and assessable back here in the corner for her.
M.H.: Okay, before this, we had a lot of photographs, stored in big boxes around here. Where did they go?
C.M.: Yeah. Yeah. Well what we did is, we utilized her built-ins and then chose photo storage boxes and then she also had some miscellaneous storage items and things like that. We labeled them so that she knew where they were and really utilized that space a lot better than it was being used before.
M.H.: So we really have the same amount of material in this closet? You guys didn't throw anything away to make it look like it's less?
C.M.: Oh, no. Absolutely not, and room to grow on too, which is great.
M.H.: And just look what we did to this tiny closet.
C.M.: The function is one of the most important things in the beginning you have to decide. We decided what the particular function for this closet was going to be. This is a baby's closet and we designed the closet around the needs of an infant.
M.H.: Colleen, this closet was a little smaller and we didn't have much room to work in. How did you finish it out?
C.M.: Well, it's great. It's got ten foot ceilings, so it's much taller than normal closets are. We added some shelving at the top, and obviously a step stool, so that you can actually utilize those shelves at the top.
M.H.: So it's a small space, but we can still put a lot in it.
C.M.: Absolutely.
M.H.: Colleen, I would imagine this closet had some different problems, being an adult's closet, and you've even got an angled ceiling on the top to push down on the shelves.
C.M.: Right.
M.H.: What could you do?
C.M.: Well, actually, I think a lot of people can identify with this closet, because it's not that large, it is a walk-in closet, and one of the problems was it was a walk-in closet you couldn't walk into. They had long hanging rods on two of the walls but he only had short hanging clothes, so again we had that wasted space below, with a bunch of things, shoes and things, thrown at the bottom, and so you couldn't even walk in.
M.H.: So what did you do to correct that?
C.M.: We created double hanging space specifically for him and we added two shoe racks for him below his hanging clothes.
M.H.: What did you do here with this grid system?
C.M.: That was accessory space. Again, those were things that were just somewhere located within the closet.
M.H.: And is this okay, to put stuff on the door?
C.M.: Absolutely, doors should always be used. It's generally wasted space. Any vertical space you can use you want to utilize.
M.H.: Colleen, if someone wants to come in the store and buy the parts that they need, what do they do before they get to the store?
C.M.: They really just need to take dimensions and measurements of their closet and then also an inventory of the items that are going to be located within the closet. And then the salesperson will design a master plan and really solve all of their problems.
M.H.: So go ahead and design the whole closet even if you're only going to do a piece at a time?
C.M.: Absolutely. And that's the neat thing with this system, you have the ability to do that if you want. Or you can do the master plan at the beginning, which is what we're going to do, in solving the problems.
M.H.: And when those problems are solved, there's a place for everything, including things you wish you really didn't have to save. Our closet redoes were easy to install and would be a great weekend project. The baby's closet cost $225, the small walk-in $375, and the super size walk-in cost $2,500. But remember, you don't have to do the whole project at once. You can do it in stages.
Episode 30 1996 - 97 Season
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