Friday, July 10, 2020

Closet Catastrophe

Four weeks ago, right as I was about to start packing to attend ConFinement, this happened:


I'm glad it happened during daylight hours instead of while I was sleeping, because that would have scared the everliving crap out me. There was a terribly thundering crash and then the doors of my closet bulged as they threatened to vomit its contents into my room.

I had a picture of the cleaned-out closet here, but I can't find it. The short version is that I had put too much weight on it, the hardware failed, the screws holding it place ripped out of the drywall, and it all crashed down.

The reason for the failure is, I am certain, these things:


























And the reason I say that is because these were predominantly on the side where the shelf failed, and I can tell where it failed because the brackets holding it up sheared off and/or were fully pulled from the wall, whereas the side opposite it just failed sympathetically.

It's my belief that these items concentrated the weight of the clothing in specific points rather than spreading that weight evenly across the surface of the rack, and that's what caused the collapse.



A month later, I have a repaired shelf/clothes rack/thing, an empty closet, and the joy involved of unpacking all the contents of the closet which I packed up to empty it, all while trying not to overload this new shelf. the mounting points are in new places, and the handyman even took pains to mount it to all the wall studs he could find.

Moral of the story:  If you have flimsy hardware like this, don't use hangars like that.

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