107 Brigham Hill: For every "easy" project, there's that other "easy" project.

With the closets nice and freshly painted, all I had to do was put the closet rods back up. But the closet rods, probably about 100 years old if they were a day, were terribly swaybacked. Off to Home Depot we go!
There were three closets that needed new rods. One was a half-height eve closet, and it had hand-cut little wooden braces to hold up the rod. It was also about 30" wide. Awesome.
The other two closets are the New closets, and they use 1" pipe flanges for the rod pockets. This is not terribly unusual - my grandfather did the same thing in his house. But they had used 1" wood dowels instead of a length of pipe as the rod.
One closet is about 38" wide, the other is about 42" wide.
Modern hardware stores only carry 1" oak dowels in 36" segments.
You see my predicament.
I bought 3 dowels, and cut the one to length for the old closet. It fits perfectly.
The other two... well.
At first I bought a selection of "nipples" - little threaded pipe segments meant to extend the flange. And it would have worked, functionally. It looked so terribly cobbed, I just couldn't let it go. Back to Home Depot I went (luckily, it's not that far away).
I returned the two dowels and all the nipples. (Yes, I snickered inwardly like a 12 year old every time it came up on the register.) I walked over to the pipe section, flange in one hand, old rods in the other, and had the nice man cut me 2 sections of pipe and thread them.
I should be able to come home, thread the pipe into the wall and be done, right?
Wrong.
One flange in each closet would not come off the wall, due to stripped screw heads and time. My thought was to over-thread one end, screw the pipe into the frozen side, and then back out the movable side to the wall. Easy peasey.
Nope.
The original rods must have been exactly the width of the closet, with no play. Now I had pipes that I couldn't thread into the flanges because there was no wiggle room. I had to get the frozen flanges off the (freshly painted) walls, even if I had to cut the buggers off.

Closet rods get serious.

With a great deal of mechanical persuasion, I got the flanges off the wall and threaded them onto the pipe. By the way - never trust the stock thread on black pipe - have the nice man re-cut them or otherwise make sure they are clean and clear. There's one that would only go on half way, and it's because of the stock thread - all the other fresh cut threaded ends were fine. I wedged them back where they belonged, and went to screw them down.
Never, ever fall prey to the pretty brass screws. I know they claim to be wood working screws, and they are pretty. They are a terrible lie designed to make you cry with frustration. Just get the plain old ones. You'll thank me.
Two stripped and one bent brass screw later, I just put back the messed up old slotted screws. They aren't pretty. They are functional. It is a closet, no one cares. In the future, I might replace them all with slightly longer screws, but they are fine.

After the rods were finally up, I put up a bunch of little LED motion activated and touch lights. In a perfect world these would all be wired, but I don't have HGTV's budget, so battery LEDs are solving the problem. Motion lights in the tall closets, touch lights in the short closets.