Elfa mania

I've mentioned the Elfa shelving product a few times before. We visited the Container Store on Christmas Eve to design and buy the Elfa arrangements for our closet spaces. This turned out to be a long process simply due to the need to work thru the design for each space, of which we have seven (four bedroom closets, upstairs bath closet, pantry, and my wife's small office). Some were simple, others huge. In the end we bought the hardware for every space but one. The Container store folks were great in that they pulled our order super fast, and even loaded it up for us. There's a LOT of metal and weight with this size of an order; my Explorer was squatting in the rear quite a bit:

We had three employees helping to load our car; a couple of them mentioned that they'd never seen such a large order before. I'm not sure whether to be flattered or nervous. :-)

This is a bit of what your house looks like after bringing so much Elfa stuff home; kind of a wire shelving explosion all over:

We've also been moving a lot of stuff over the last few days but aren't quite ready to move in. It's hard to utilize the closet space unless you have shelves, so we decided to use today to install the Elfa stuff. My wife and I spent close to nine solid hours on this, which was lots of "fun" (up the ladder, down the ladder, up the ladder, etc, etc - it wears you out after a while). This is a picture of me working on one side of my wife's closet:

As you can see, my wife opted for a lot of hanging rod space - the side under the window (not yet finished) will be "long hang", i.e. for long coats and other clothes.

This is the narrow side of the pantry:

This Elfa shelving really allowed us to reap the benefits of our nine foot high ceilings - a lot of the spaces have top shelves only a foot or so from the ceiling. (Ok, obviously you'd need a step ladder for those shelves, but everyone has seldom-used items which would store nicely up there.) The pantry especially has a huge amount of storage space - enough to feed an army if it was filled. Well we don't have an army to feed so I will have to keep tabs on my wife ("no honey, just because it's on sale doesn't mean we need to buy it...").

My closet is a bit harder to see into; this is the best I could do:

We finished all of the installation except for the third upstairs bedroom, which isn't critical since no-one's going to live in it for now (we'll install it later in January, before the Elfa sale ends). Otherwise now that the closet spaces are done, we'll get back to work on moving stuff over.