Thanks, mnzinnia. So you assembled the pax units and then slid them into your closet? And you have some parts of the closet with the pax boxes and some without? And your doors are not Ikea?

Hi daisychain,

When we installed hardwood in the bedrooms a couple of years ago, we took off the sliding doors in 1 of the spare room, build pax cabinets and inserted them in the closet space. The doors are also ikea. There was a little bit of a gap in space, maybe 1" or so, going around the sides and top so had sone trim placed around to close up the opening.( not perfect along the top...need a better handyman;)

As the room is small, we chose to leave 1 section open without a door for sone display. The drawers are kept empty for any guests.

We were torn with using the sliders, but went this route. I think cost for entire setup @'$800 Cdn.

FYI, Inside, we have a bar for hanging clothes w/ 1 shelf at top and 2 long drawers at the bottom.

We have 48 inch closet openings. For the front entrance we used 2 -24" doors.

For the other 3 closets our carpenter is going to make us 3- 16" doors to slide. He will make them thinner so they aren't too bulky.

I don't understand the Pax system. Not sure why I can't wrap my head around it. We were thinking of doing bifolds again but they would have been $700 a set! Times 4! Not sure if the made doors will be less, but they'll look nice! Didn't want to do 24 inch sliding as the opening to get clothes would be too small. Couldn't do the 2-24" doors in the other rooms due to clearance because the rooms are small and awkward.

Hope this decision isn't too painful for you!

Angie

hmm, the pictures are very helpful. Even though everyone is recommending sliding, I much prefer the look of hinged doors.

I'll take these pics to the house tomorrow to show them. Hopefully a picture will be worth a thousand words.

I would use regular closet doors, rather than the Pax doors. That way if you like you could match the other doors in your house. Please check that the doors you choose do not interfere with your drawers (if you are planning to use those). Hinged doors might be better if they will allow full closet access. My parents have two Pax units built into a closet with sliding bypass doors. In the middle where the doors meet, they left a gap between the Pax units and added a hanging rod, that area is used to store rarely worn clothes. In other words, make sure to measure :-)

I actually spent money to rip out my framed closet in order to install the pax system and make it look built in.

The final result was 3x the storage capacity and smaller footprint than the framed closet. That's because no one in the family including the teenagers used any section above eye level until we ripped out the closet. We were also able to use all the way up the 9' ceiling.

Thanks so much everyone. I spoke with the designer and framers today and we've figured out that in both of our closet spaces we can fit 2 of the large Pax units and 1 small. There will only be about 3 inches of wasted space on either end, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I'll probably be back for more advice once we start trying to assemble as I hear it can be a bit of a trial and our contractor has adamantly refused to assemble any Ikea products.

We are going to do hinged Pax door. We've had sliding before and found them really frustrating when sharing a closet. I'm thinking of either getting the solid wood we can paint to match the walls and/or trim or a flat white door that we can wallpaper.

Hi mnzinnia, looks like you used the Pax unit on one side and attached a hanging rod to the "outside" of the pax unit - did you use standard wood screws to do this? I am looking to do something similar where a 20" Pax unit would be in the centre (with pullouts like yours) and hanging rods on either side which will then attach to the wall on the other sides

sadalja, we were going to go that route. It worked out that we couldn't use the Pax system the way they framed the closets so we are having our carpenter build us custom units. He is doing exactly what you are describing except instead of using a Pax unit in the centre, he's building us a custom unit. I'll post pix when it's done.

Yes, we placed the PAX unit into a regular closet before putting on the bifold doors. The closet poles and supports were adjusted to fit available space on both sides of the unit (the closet is one wide space with 2 door units). They butted up to the sides of the PAX. Worked great!

Mnzinnia, if you get a chance, could you post a picture of the closet pole attached to the side of the pax, and also could you tell me HOW you attached it? We have a coat closet and want to put one shelf unit in and attach the pole to the side of it (and to the wall on the other end). The pole will be about 4.5' long.