STILL IN THE CLOSET!

 Day One of the closet makeover.
Oye! That's Yiddish for Oye! Jack happily anticipates yet another honey-dooo! This one will take a couple of days, lots of work but not too much money! I've waited 5 years for this makeover!

 This is the before. Shoes are all over the floor and on the top shelf. My lingerie chest is stuck on the bottom shoe shelf (a bookcase that we re-purposed and layed in there sideways. What you can't see is that I have another closet half full of clothes in the guest bedroom because stuff just won't all fit in our so-called master bedroom closet...we call it a stand-in closet because it's 36" deep.

 Our plan? Take everything out, move up the top shelf to within 12" of the ceiling, replace the warped wooden dowel circa 1978 with a new powder coated steel dowel. Replace the dowel holder/shelf brackets (they're bent) with new ones and then decide about where to put the lower racks. Wood supports will be needed for the shelf and the dowel end holders as they were quite stingy with the 2x4's in the side walls! 
A brief intermission while we go to the hardware store. Hubbard's Hardware is our favorite place for stuff...we did our best to support the local economy and spent about $100 for hardware and wood. Turns out that they had everything we needed!

 By the end of day one, we had done much head scratching to figure out where we wanted the lower racks...we ended up making Jack's side (the right side) lower by a couple of inches than my side. His shirts are longer than my tops and we wanted to put those on the top rack. I finished off with painting all the new wood supports on the side walls. 

Here you can see our new metal racks and the metal brackets holding them. The big white bracket is screwed into the 2x4 at the back of the closet. You can just make out the wood 1x4 that we used on the side wall to hold the dowel fixture. The back wall stud location dictated the width of the new racks. My side is wider than Jack's because of that. Seems right to me! Tomorrow we'll put in the shoe storage and re-install the sliding mirror doors.