Sunday 5 October 2008

Closets And Shelves

One of the most important parts that make up a closet is the shelf. Although the closet rod usually takes center stage due to the amount of space that it requires for hanging clothes, the closet shelves are the ones that maximize the storage space in a closet. Closet shelves come in many shapes and sizes and provide a useful stacking system with which many different types of items can be stored on.

Typically, shelves are flat pieces of wood that slots into a gap in the closet. The shelf is help up by a few anchor points on the closet walls. Some shelves are nailed tight to the closet walls to provide a permanent fixed-height storage space. Other shelves rest on repositionable anchors that give you the freedom of determining the various shelf heights that you need. Then there are fixed width shelves ranging from narrow ones at the side of the closet to wide ones that complement the closet rod.

Closet shelves, whether fixed to the closet or repositionable, generally stay put in their assigned spaces. You can opt to be different by purchasing closets with shelves that can slide out like a drawer. These sliding shelves are normally made of wire frame and are normally situated below waist level for ease of access. Wire frame sliding shelves lets you have a quick glance of the contents to avoid having to multiple drawers to find something.

Wide shelves can sometimes pose a problem where the items stored side by side keep falling onto each other. Also, you might only need multiple narrow shelves but find that you have occupied the dedicated narrow shelves and only have the wide shelves left to work with. Shelf dividers will help you solve this problem. They work like the book stands you see at the library. You can create partitions on a wider shelf and also use the shelf dividers as support for items that keep leaning over to one side.

Last but not least are the unique half-shelf where the depth of the shelf occupies only the front half of the closet, leaving a hole at the rear. This type of shelf could be useful for closets that need to store long items such as fishing rods, umbrellas or golf clubs.