Five Takes on How to Squeeze
More Space out of a Closet

Closet space is coveted in homes, but most people still can't make order out of the chaos that lurks behind closed doors.

Not that serious money isn't spent trying. Americans drop more than $1.2 billion a year to spruce up closets, more than 20% of what they spend on home organization overall, according to Fredonia Group, a market researcher.

We decided to find out just how tough -- and expensive -- it can be to rearrange closet space. The issue with our tester's jam-packed closet: It is 18 inches deep (around 24" is standard), so oversize sliding doors rub against bulky items like suits. A lone shelf along the top provides cramped storage. One upside is that it stretches nearly 10 feet across. In our hallway we have a combined utility closet and spare pantry. It is barely 13 inches deep, with shelves that stop two inches short of the front wall. While the closet interior reaches to a nine-foot ceiling, the doors are standard height, blocking access to the top few feet. That leaves far more room in this cupboard than we can utilize.

We approached five organizational experts to see if they could offer an answer. We found that not everyone could find a solution for both spaces, but we were happy overall with the range of ideas. The best came from a local carpenter, who suggested a low-cost way to make use of the high areas of our closet. In the bedroom, the best ideas were to replace the doors to get more depth and to go to the Container Store for new shelves and rods.

The California Closets consultant took about 90 minutes to measure the closets and formulate ideas. We liked putting in our two cents on how many shelves we wanted for shoes and how much hanging space we needed. In the hallway, he offered to increase the number of shelves to increase the usable space. But given all the tall items we keep there, like a stockpot and extra vases, we suspect we'd wind up removing a few after the system was installed. And he wasn't able to improve access to the top of the closet.

Dealing with the Container Store was frustrating. We had to take numerous measurements and plug them in to a form on the store's Web site along with details about how we use the closets. Then we could go to the store or ask for a phone consultation. We opted for the latter. A consultant said the store's shelves wouldn't fit our hallway at all -- disappointing! -- but a separate discussion about the bedroom seemed to go well. She said she could work with our odd dimensions. The resulting plans showed plenty of room for suits, pants, shirts, shoes and folded clothes, but no place to hang long items like dresses or coats. We swapped emails but the online consultants couldn't create a plan that worked for us.

We found a professional organizer through a referral Web site (www.onlineorganizing.com). Her ideas for the bedroom ran from simple (such as replacing the closet doors with drapes to save our clothes and soften the room) to pricey (moving the closet wall out about six inches, which would necessitate shifting the bedroom door and a light switch as well). In the hallway, she suggested cutting a new door frame to bring the doors up to the ceiling, and put us in touch with a local contractor. The contractor advised us that moving the closet wall in the bedroom wouldn't be worth the cost and hassle. He could recut the doorway in the hall and rebuild the inside to improve the shelving, but it would cost $2,700, by far the highest estimate.

We located a design student by calling a local college. For the bedroom, she suggested bifolding doors that open to the middle (to avoid interfering with items at either end). Then she did some legwork. She sat down with a designer at the Container Store and cooked up a better design for the bedroom than we did by going to the store ourselves. They removed the hanging bar that ran the width of the closet, and added two rows of bars at either end that hung perpendicular to the front wall. Then they filled in the middle with shelves for shoes and folded clothes, and with hanging space for dresses. It would cost about $500, or a little more if we also got new doors. She also found a shelving system at Ikea that would fit in the hallway closet and be easy to install ourselves. The cost: $200 to $300.

A carpenter, whose work was recommended on a neighborhood Web site, provided solutions that were creative and economical. For the bedroom, he suggested extending the door frame by four inches to make the broad middle of the closet deeper, and upgrading the dark-wood sliding doors. He didn't have ideas for the inside. For the hallway, he suggested running shelves the full width of the closet along the bottom third to make the most use of that space. He proposed ready-made shelves from a home-improvement store and offered to help buy the right sizes and to install them in case we need to trim the shelves to fit them properly in the tight space.

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