{"id":155,"date":"2007-01-25T23:35:43","date_gmt":"2007-01-26T06:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2007\/01\/25\/lessons-from-the-closet\/"},"modified":"2021-06-12T03:36:55","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T03:36:55","slug":"lessons-from-the-closet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/2007\/01\/25\/lessons-from-the-closet\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons From The Closet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently had a request from a loyal reader about my attempt to make a custom closet.  So here it is&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been slowly working on renovating my condo.  One of the big issues for the reno is maximizing storage space, because there ain&#8217;t much of it.  So I invited 5 closet builders to show me how they&#8217;d redesign the closets and how much it would cost.  These builders were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>California Closets &#8211; expensive, and unresponsive&#8211;we had to ask them twice for the quote<\/li>\n<li>Canadian Closets &#8211; the cheapest bid, but we hear they use lower quality hardware<\/li>\n<li>Metropolitan Closets &#8211; had hard time listening to what I wanted, then told me they wouldn&#8217;t do what I wanted<\/li>\n<li>Original Closet Warehouse &#8211; decent price, but inefficient design<\/li>\n<li>StoreMor Closets &#8211; had to ask twice for quote after they visited, and they ignored each request<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My first lesson was how hard it is for people to think beyond where they&#8217;ve thought before.  Indeed Metropolitan Closets told me that they would not take a job that required them to think beyond.  And none of them managed to design a closet system that maximized the space, because the space is unusually large such that thier standard modules and assembly practices wouldn&#8217;t work for the space.  <\/p>\n<p>In other words thier thinking was entirely restricted to the standard modules they carry and the standard ways they use them.<\/p>\n<p>Well standard wouldn&#8217;t solve my problems so I had to do it myself.  Fortunately I had the whole thing designed in Sketchup and all I needed to do was go buy the pieces and assemble them.  Of course I had more lessons to learn.<\/p>\n<p>My second lesson was once you have a plan stick to it, don&#8217;t improvise.  When you&#8217;re in the design phase you&#8217;re free to do what ever.  But once you&#8217;re in development, stick to the plan.  I ended up with exactly what I planned out, but only after trying a couple of mid-project improvisations that didn&#8217;t work out, requiring a lot of back-peddling, and forcing me to waste hours and hours of time and near countless trips to the hardware store.  Ready, Fire, Aim simply does not work.<\/p>\n<p>My third lesson was once you have a plan and know all the matials you need, buy all of the materials at once, in fact buy more than you need, and don&#8217;t start building till you have all of the materials.  Do not go off half-assed.<\/p>\n<p>And the biggest lesson was get it done right, the first time.  <\/p>\n<p>I have learned these last three lesson before, doing other home improvement projects and rebuilding an old 73 BMW 2002.  I guess it just takes a while for lessons to sink into my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently had a request from a loyal reader about my attempt to make a custom closet. So here it is&#8230; I&#8217;ve been slowly working on renovating my condo. One of the big issues for the reno is maximizing storage space, because there ain&#8217;t much of it. So I invited 5 closet builders to show [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/parCYG-2v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scoobr.com\/niblettes_old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}