My wife had quite a surprise yesterday. While we were out, the shelf in her closet collapsed, dumping clothing and everything else on the floor. The picture at left shows it after we removed everything - right now every doorknob and hook in the house has something hanging from it while we figure out what we want to do about repairs.

It surprised me that the wall clips actually broke (see detail). These were not the kind where the shelf can pop out; these were full clips that had to break right through, and that's not easy to do.

Obviously we overloaded the shelf, and apparently so have other folks here at Oak Point; we've heard other stories of shelf crashes. These things will hold quite a bit of weight, but they obviously have their limits, and we reached it. The same thing happened to us with a similar shelf I had installed in the garage - when that came crashing down we happened to be at home and heard it. It was very loud and was an even bigger mess: quite a few things broke.

I want to replace both of these with something much stronger, and while we have gone around and lightened the load on all our other shelves, I'm thinking of reinforcing those too. You can buy extra clips and support rods at Home Depot or Lowes, but of course the problem is that adding more of those doesn't look very attractive.

On the other hand, I really don't want to go to the expense of replacing everything, and I'm not even sure that you can get any stronger without going to full wooden shelving. That would be a lot of work and I'm not sure it's really necessary: we just need to avoid overloading what we have now.

Take a close look at your shelving: if it is bowing even slightly from the weight, it may let go entirely later. Examine the wall clips closely also: if they have cracks or if some are starting to pull out, you are heading for trouble.