Laundry Room Closet

There is a small closet next to our laundry room that houses the electrical box and the water heater.  As the months have gone by, this space has done nothing but collect junk, especially on the floor.  It was lacking useful storage space, so I decided to tackle this as my next project.

Look at all of that crap - cleaning products, paper towels and toilet paper, 10,000 reuseable grocery bags....

The good people at the Container Store helped me design a shelving system for this closet.  I obviously couldn't have the shelf go all the way across the wall because of the electrical box.  The remaining space was about 55" across.  Because of the distance, we couldn't just do one long shelf - I had to run a tract in the middle for support.

First step is to hang the main tract (the horizontal bar).  You've got to do quite a balancing act (it's heavy too) of holding it level and marking all of the holes with a pencil.  Then you drill the holes, insert dry wall supports in the holes that aren't on studs, and then hang the tract and screw it in.

The next part is easy - slip on the three vertical tract lines and space them out according to how wide your shelves are.  The left side's shelves are 24" wide and the right side's shelves are 28" wide.

 After the vertical supports are in, you just pick how high/far apart you want your shelves to be and insert the brackets.  After that, the shelves just snap into place.

On one shelf, I decided to do a basket to hold smaller things like Waffles' medication/brushes.  I'm sure I'll think of other stuff in the future.  I also got clear shelf liners in case I ever want to put anything small on these shelves (they won't fall through the spaces).

The designer at the Container Store recommended leaving a few inches of extra space on the left side for support.  It looks a little funny but I guess they know what they're doing.

 Final product! So much useful space now!

For those of you that have asked about time/cost:  this project cost me $247 (all spent at the Container Store but I did have a 30% off coupon).  It took me about 2 hours and 15 minutes to do this project.