Most of the closets we build will never be in a magazine. They’re the reach-in in a spare room, or the hallway closet with bifold doors, or the main bedroom closet in a 1990s two-storey that was built with one rod and one wobbly shelf.
Most of the photos on our site are the big ones, though, and that gives a skewed picture of what a custom closet costs. So here are five ordinary reach-ins we finished this fall in Barrie, Midland and Oshawa, cheapest first.
Each price below is the range we’d quote today before any promotion or discount. What a homeowner ends up paying depends on what’s running that month, which is why we don’t publish the sold figure for any single job.
Midland: One Tower, One Rod, About $1,900 to $2,200
This is about as simple as a custom closet gets. A full-height shelf tower takes the left third, and the rest is a single rod at long-hang height with a shelf above it.
Simple doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. A tower of open shelves holds a dresser’s worth of folded clothes, and you can see all of it. If the bedroom is small, moving the folded clothes into the closet is often what frees up the floor.
Barrie: A Woodgrain Reach-In, About $2,300 to $2,700
The layout here is close to Midland’s: a tower of shelves with double hanging beside it, and long hanging on the other side. The difference you can see is the finish. It’s a light woodgrain with darker back panels instead of plain white, which looks a lot more like furniture once the doors are open.
A colour or woodgrain costs more than white, and it’s one of the few upgrades you notice every single morning. Your designer can price both side by side so you can decide.
Barrie: A Hallway Closet, About $2,400 to $2,900
Hallway closets do a different job from bedroom ones. Less hanging, more of the things that don’t belong anywhere else: board games, the spare duvet, the printer paper. This one keeps a rod across the top half for jackets and puts two columns of short shelves underneath, so nothing ends up stacked six deep on the floor.
It came in a little above the woodgrain bedroom closet, and the shelves are why. A shelf is a cut and finished panel, while a rod is a length of tube.
Midland: The Classic Three-Section, About $2,700 to $3,200
The closet at the top of this page is the one we build more than any other. There’s a tower of shelves in the middle with double hanging on both sides, which gives you shirts over trousers twice and a place for folded things in between. It works in almost any reach-in from about six feet wide.
If you want drawers in that centre tower instead of open shelves, expect the price to move up. We’ve written about when drawers are worth it and when shelves do the job, and the short version is that drawers earn their keep for small things and underwear and are overkill for sweaters.
Oshawa: A Wide Closet, About $3,500 to $4,100
Same parts, more of them. This main bedroom closet runs the full width of the wall, so it takes two shelf towers and three hanging sections, with the hanging tucked into the returns at each end where it’s hard to reach anyway.
It’s the most expensive of the five, and the reason is width rather than anything fancy. Price follows the number of sections far more closely than it follows the finish.
A Smaller Fix: A Built-In Dresser, About $1,200 to $1,400
Not every closet needs a whole new interior. In this Aurora bedroom the homeowner kept the closet and had us build a three-drawer dresser into the bottom of it. It takes the dresser off the bedroom floor and gives the room back a wall.
What This Tells You About Your Own Closet
Two of these five come in under the $2,500 starting point we publish for reach-ins. We’d rather show you that than hide it. Small, square, white closets in newer houses can come in low, and a wide closet with a colour finish will sit well above it.
The things that move the number, roughly in order:
- How many sections wide the closet is.
- Drawers instead of shelves.
- A colour or woodgrain instead of white.
- Old walls that need the unit scribed to fit, or old shelving that has to come out first.
For walk-ins and bigger rooms, our guide to custom closet costs in Ontario goes through the full range, and our closet renovation cost page has the ranges by closet type, with a calculator.
Get a Real Number
A designer comes to your house with samples, measures the closet and draws the layout with you in about ninety minutes, and you get a fixed quote from that drawing. Everything is built in our Barrie workshop, installed by our own crew and covered by our Homeowners Lifetime Warranty. Book your design appointment and find out where your closet lands.
