Custom Closets and Storage Solutions for Maynard Homes

Design and Installation, Measured On Site

Mad Garages and Closets builds custom closets for homeowners in Maynard, MA: walk-in closets, reach-in closets, kids closets and closet organizers. This is a small, dense town, roughly 10,700 people in 5.4 square miles, and much of its housing went up for mill families rather than for wardrobes. Custom closets here have to start from that. The original bedroom closets run shallower than the twenty-four inches a hanger actually needs, with one pole and a single shelf, and some bedrooms have no closet at all. Every job starts with a free in-home visit and a tape measure: opening width, ceiling height, door swing, and a count of what has to go back in. You get a drawing and a written price before any material is cut.

Custom Closets Tailored for Maynard Residents

Custom closets in Maynard depend almost entirely on which kind of house you are standing in, and the town has three.

The New Village houses, on the streets named for presidents, were built by the American Woolen Company in 1902 and 1903 for people who worked at the mill. They are compact by design. Bedrooms are small, ceilings sit closer to eight feet than nine, and the closet is a shallow box beside the chimney chase with one pole in it. One wall in the room is usually the only usable one, the wall without the door, the window or the radiator, and custom closets in these rooms start there.

Two-family houses are a large part of that same stock. When the mill auctioned off its housing in 1934, forty-nine of the dwellings that sold were two-families, and that layout stacks one flat over another with a single closet per bedroom. We design custom closets for each unit separately, because the upstairs bedrooms sit under the roof and lose height at the walls while the downstairs bedrooms do not.

The houses closer to Main Street and the Assabet River came before closets were standard equipment in a bedroom. What is there now got added later: a wardrobe doing a closet’s job, or a box framed into a corner with nothing solid behind it to screw into. Custom closets in those rooms need blocking put in first to carry the load, and then the vertical panels get scribed to walls that have been moving since the house went up.

Our custom closets in Maynard, MA begin with a free visit to the house. The designer takes the opening, the ceiling height, the swing of the door and the depth of the baseboard, then goes through what is actually kept in there. Maynard has no commuter rail station of its own. The work clothes in these closets belong to somebody who drives, either to South Acton station about a mile past the town line, or the whole way in. Coats and boots are in use from November through March, so they need to be reachable rather than stored. The layout comes back to you in 3D. Move a drawer bank, raise a rod, then sign off and take a firm price and an install date from that drawing.

Designs That Help Maximize Storage

Custom closets here get built to what is already in the house, from a walk-in you can stand up in to a reach-in behind one original door.

Walk-In Closets. Perimeter wire shelving wastes the two parts of a walk-in worth having: the floor in the middle of the room and the top of the walls. Two levels of hanging along the long side, a bank of drawers sized to what you fold rather than hang, and shoe shelves pitched forward so you can read them from the door. Where the closet opens straight onto the bedroom, price the mirrors, the glass insert doors and the shaker fronts, because that closet is part of the room.

Reach-In Closets. A reach-in in one of the older houses is fighting two things at once. The door steals depth, and one fixed shelf sets the height for everything under it. Rebuilt, that same box takes two hanging levels on one side, a full-length section for coats and dresses on the other, and drawers at the bottom where shoes used to collect. If the depth measures under twenty-four inches, the rod goes in angled or facing front so clothes hang clear of the back wall.

Kids Closets. Custom closets for children get set to a height the child can use, then moved as they grow. A pole at about forty inches with bins on the floor works at five. At fifteen the same closet needs full-length hanging and drawers deep enough for a folded uniform. Shelves on pins and a second rod that steps up in stages get you from one to the other without paying for the closet twice.

Closet Organizers. Accessories come last, after the layout, so each one has to earn the hanging space it costs: shoe racks, jewelry drawers lined in felt, a tip-out hamper, pull-outs for belts and ties, and a valet rod for whatever you are wearing tomorrow.

Closet Features That Make Life Easier

Five things go into every one of our custom closets.

• Soft-close hinges, adjustable, so a door that has shifted gets trued up with a screwdriver rather than a service call
• Shelves that move on drilled pin spacing, so the closet holding a toddler’s folded clothes this year can hold a hockey bag in four
• Full-extension drawers, so the back of the drawer is somewhere you reach rather than somewhere things go missing
• Thermally fused laminate, edge banded in 3mm wherever an edge shows, which survives hangers being dragged along it and wipes clean
• A lifetime guarantee on all wood products

Price on custom closets in Maynard, MA moves with three things. The number of drawers, the door and drawer fronts you pick, and how much the case has to be cut to clear something immovable. That last one is usually a chimney chase or a radiator. Each of those is its own line on the estimate, so if the total comes back too high you can see exactly where to take it down.

Make the Most of Your Linen Closet Space

The hall linen closet in a mill-era house is usually the only linen storage upstairs, and it was built with plank shelves nailed to painted cleats at a spacing nobody has touched since. Half of what is in there is air. Custom closets reset the shelf heights to the things you keep and give each bed size its own divided section, then add a pull-out hamper and sliding baskets for the small items. The same box becomes storage you can read at a glance. Put the off-season bedding on a labeled top shelf while you are in there, so the quilts stop living in the basement.

Your Custom Storage Experts

Mad Garages and Closets has been building custom closets for homeowners in Maynard, MA for more than a decade. Our shop is at 8 Industrial Way in Salem, NH, and every panel is cut there rather than in your bedroom, which keeps the disruption inside the house short. The person who measures your closet is the same person who runs the install and the same person who picks up the phone about it a year later.

Why Mad Garages and Closets Is a Proven Choice

Maynard, MA homeowners choose our custom closets for what happens once the van is in the driveway.

• Openings in these houses are rarely square. We measure the error and scribe the panel into the wall instead of leaving a shimmed gap and calling it a reveal.
• We work in occupied houses. The hall and the stair get covered, and the room is put back in order at the end of each day.
• In a two-family, each unit is scheduled and priced separately, and we can work around a tenant’s hours if the access is arranged in advance.
• Where the ceiling is eight feet rather than nine, we build to the ceiling and put the off season in a top box instead of leaving dead air above the closet.
• Where a chimney chase, a stack pipe or a radiator takes the corner, the case is cut to it at the shop, so nothing is improvised in your bedroom.
• The 3D drawing is there to be argued with. Move the drawer bank, change a rod height, and we build the version you signed.

Questions Maynard Homeowners Ask

We own a two-family on one of the president streets and rent the second floor. Can you build custom closets in the tenant’s unit?

Yes, with the tenant’s agreement and access arranged before we schedule. Panels are cut at our shop, so the work inside the unit is measured in hours rather than days. We do one room at a time, so the tenant still has a usable bedroom that night. Tell us at the measure who we should contact on the day.

Our bedrooms are small, about ten by eleven. Will a built-in system make the room feel even smaller?

Custom closets built inside the existing closet take no floor space from the bedroom at all, because they live entirely in the box that is already there. Floor space only comes into it when there is no closet to work with and the storage has to stand in the room. In that case the usual answer is a shallow unit on the wall with the fewest interruptions, which reads as furniture rather than as a wall of cabinets. We measure the bedroom door swing first, since that is what decides which wall is available.

Our closet has bifold doors that jump the track constantly. Do you replace the doors, or only the inside?

We build the interior of the closet. If the bifolds are staying, say so at the measure, because they eat several inches of the opening when they stack and the layout has to allow for it. In a small bedroom, taking the doors off and treating the closet as open storage is often the better result, and it costs nothing to live with for a week before deciding.

We have a bureau we want to keep. Can the closet be designed around it?

Yes, and it is much easier to say so at the measure than after the drawing exists. We take the width, depth and height of the piece and leave a bay for it. The wall above it then takes shelving or a short hang, so the space over the bureau is not wasted. Keeping a bureau usually means fewer built-in drawers, which lowers the price.

When the old wire shelving comes out, are we left with holes in the plaster, and who fixes them?

Old anchors and cleats come out with the shelving, and that leaves fastener holes and sometimes a paint line where the shelf sat. Much of the old wall gets covered by the new system, so the repair is usually smaller than people expect. The designer can tell you at the measure which surfaces will still be visible. Ask at that visit what the install covers on wall repair and what is left to you, so nobody is guessing on the day.

How do I know a rebuilt closet will actually hold everything we own?

Because it gets counted rather than estimated. At the measure the designer counts hanging inches by category, long hang and short hang, plus folded stacks and pairs of shoes. The custom closets get drawn to those numbers, with room left over. If what you own genuinely does not fit the closet you have, we will say so at that visit. We would rather show you what a second location in the house could take than build a system that is full on the day it goes in.

Begin Your Organization Upgrade Today

Custom closets in Maynard, MA begin with a free in-home visit, a measured drawing and a written price, with no obligation after any of the three. Call (603) 865-1444 or send the form below and we will find a time that works.