(2009-10-06) Installing Rubbermaid Homefree Closet System

Our Laundry Room has a big closet not easy to make use of right now. We don't want to spend money doing California Closet on it, so I'm going to figure out HowTo try the Rubber Maid Home Free system. The closet is 6' wide, and I bought the 6-10' kit.

• I had to remove the old shelf and coat-rack-bar. Not a problem.

• Want to mount the "hang rails". But the instructions talk about screwing into studs no more than 24" apart. But I only have 2 studs, 32" apart, splitting the closet into thirds. This also causes issues because if I put the longer rail flush-left in the closet, it doesn't reach the 2nd stud, which seems like a bad idea. So I'm going to keep the rail a couple inches from the right edge of the closet so that the left-most hole hits the left stud. That will leave me some dead space on the right, but I think I can live with that (I even left the couple coat-hooks previously mounted into the wood-piece running over there.

  • actually, the studs aren't centered, so biasing it this side will leave 9.5" empty on the right. If I went the other direction, I'd only leave 3" on the left. But (a) the old hooks are on the right side, and (b) the placement of the closet in the room makes the right side more accessible than the left would be.

  • so I used anchors at the 2 outside-ends of the rails, plus the 2 stud-screws (actually, I'm not completely convinced I wasn't getting a false-positive from the Stud Finder). Then I stuck a 5th screw in between the 2 "stud" screws - I should have used an anchor, but that would have required taking other screws out to drill the anchor hole, so I figured a little help was better than none.

• Hmm, a key feature here is that the initial "hang rail" means you don't have to worry about levelling anything else. But the vertical bars aren't long enough (47", when hang rail is put at 86"!), so they have this extender/coupling system to make them longer, but that's loose/wiggly, so they suggest using a level to make the bottom section properly vertical. Amazingly bad design/decision.

• They want you to place the verticals 22" apart, but the short shelves are more than 22" and less than 44" long, so you have to overlap 2 of them to span 2 sets of verticals (else leave one shelf cantilevered into space). Is that intentional to provide more strength, or some other weird decision?

In the end, still pretty good deal.

Update: posted photos at FlickR:RubbermaidCloset.