I love seeing your closets!! We have his and hers closets in the master, and I'm not satisfied with them (and we haven't even moved in yet). Our trim carpenter suggested a simple layout for rods and shelves, which looks great. Then I asked for shoe storage like rows of cubbies (meaning get more shoes in less space). He put in a slanted shelf along the baseboard. He was so proud of it, I didn't have the heart to tell him that it wouldn't meet my needs. Now, I'm kicking myself because I'm too wimpy to insist that he rip it out and redo it. Also, the floors have been finished now. I'm to the point where I have to pick my battles. Anyway, our best storage plans for our master are to de-clutter before moving in and to keep as much as possible in our huge cedar closet (for out of season clothing and shoes).

We ended up not getting Elfa in our last apt because the 3" increments would not have maximized the space in one closet that was oddly-shaped. We also preferred the more finished-looking CA Closet-type systems. We ended up getting Easy Closets, which was a great compromise. It is fully customizable and with a coupon, priced out the same as regular price Elfa. It looked like new after several years of use, although I wonder if it would have held up so well in a pantry. I have not seen CA Closets in person, but I'm guessing it looks nicer than EC, although we had no complaints about the look of EC. Back then, CA Closets quoted us double the cost of EC. We recently moved and wanting to go "higher end," we called CA Closets again. Their quote for our walk-in closet of 17' linear feet came out to an eye-watering $7K. I priced out one of the smaller closets and once again, CA Closets came out double (actually, more than double) than EC. One benefit of custom closet makers such as CA Closets is that the work is considered a "capital improvement," meaning you can add it to the cost of your home when computing taxable gain on sale. Also means no sales tax. Easy Closets charges sales tax (at least in NY), which in reverse logic tells me that it is not considered a capital improvement, but I'm not 100% sure on this.

You can add more storage to the closet without a closet system, if you wanted to, and without the need for a lot of tools or workmen. The simplest way to add more shelving would be to put a bookcase in the closet, under one of the clothes rods. If that takes away too much hanging space, you could use a closet rod doubler, which hangs from the existing closet rod. A step up from that would be to mount shelves to the wall--either using parts of a closet system or pre-made shelves and brackets which can be found at just about any hardware store. You can add shelves all down one wall, or above the existing shelf or a foot or two above the floor, to hold shoes. There's a lot of options out there--it depends on what you need to store and what would be the most convenient way for you to store it. Here is a link that might be useful: closet rod doubler

We purchased the Martha Stewart from Home Depot. It looks great and happy with it, however unless the space is exactly 24 or 36 inches you have to cut the shelves on a table saw to fit. So for the next two sections of the walk in we simply purchased the malamine boards, used the hanging track from Martha Stewart, used one of the Martha boards as a template to cut where they need to hang and made our own for a fraction of the price. LOEWS carried the exact colour of the malamine boards (espresso from Martha - truffle from LOEWS). Now this will only work for straight hanging and shelving. But since we needed to cut all the boards from the Martha kit anyways, we figured we may as well do it all ourselves. One line I found after we did out closets was Easy Closet- looks the same as the Martha line but they cut all the boards to your specifications, you only need to cut the trac. They were about the same price. If anyone is interested I can post some pics of both the Martha and our DIY portion of the closet.