Custom Built-In Cabinets for Our Walk-In Closet

Written By John Gutierrez

THe Perfect Solution for Organizing our Wardrobe

“Building custom cabinets for our closet turned out to be one of the the best decisions we ever made.”

Finding an off-the-shelf solution to organize a closet can become a search that seemingly has no end - especially when the goal is to maximize the amount of storage you can fit in a small space while matching the overall aesthetic of your home.

This was the predicament that my wife and I found ourselves in when it came time to finish our walk-in closet. For the last 18 months we resorted to using cardboard boxes as a means to store and organize our wardrobe, which eventually became a great pain when we needed to retrieve clothing from the deep recesses of a box. After all the struggle, seeing our clothes finally moved into their proper place within our beautifully finished closet was definitely worth the wait.

Building custom cabinets for our closet turned out to be one of the the best decisions we ever made. Not only were we able to create an organizational solution that fit our space perfectly, I also learned quite a bit about the technicalities of cabinetry making and saved a pretty penny considering the high-quality materials and hardware that went into the build.

Planning and execution for this project was broken down into 3 phases - Ideation, Design, and Construction. In my opinion, focusing on these phases is essential to ensuring that the final outcome of a build aligns with the intended design.

Ideation

Forming a clear image of what a finished closet would look and feel like became the north star for all decisions that we made throughout the project. Ideation is the creative part of planning where imagination comes into play in creating a vision of what the perfect closet would be. It’s where the wishlist of features and requirements are established - such as deciding on the material of construction, type of finishes, amount of drawers, placement of shelving, and length of clothes rods - basically everything needed to properly organize our clothes while achieving the style we wanted.

We focused on creating a spacious layout with multi-functional design elements that would create an illusion of a bigger space. For example, we decided on a going with galley walk-in closet layout with cabinetry on one side and shelving with under mounted clothes rods on the other. At the end of the galley a floor-to-ceiling mirror would not only serve as a full-length mirror when changing clothes, but would also make the space appear twice the size. (Shout out to Eddie from Highland Park Glass Co. for fabricating and installing our custom mirror!)

Once we had the final vision of our walk-in closet defined, I proceeded to the design phase where all our ideas were put onto a screen to help us visualize how it all came together.

Design

Sketchup for Design

From buildings to landscapes, SketchUp’s intuitive and easy to use platform is perfect for designing all sorts of objects.

The Design phase is where outputs from the Ideation phase are translated into plans that provide more technical detail for construction. I decided to use SketchUp as my 3D modeling platform to help me create plans that specified the dimensions of components throughout the closet and generate a 3D model that showed how they fit within the space. For those of you looking for a 3D modeling software to visualize your projects and generate plans for construction, I highly recommend using SketchUp - it’s intuitive to learn the basics of the program just from watching a few YouTube videos on how to use different tools within the software to draw up cabinetry plans. From there, I was able to quickly apply the principles in creating my own cabinet design. I’ve shared a couple links to videos that I found most useful below in case you’re curious.

One of the cool things about SketchUp are the extensions that are made available to enhance the functionality of the software. OpenCutList by L’Air du Bois is a must if you’re working with dimensional lumber for your project. It helps with estimating the amount and cost of lumber for the project, generate cutting diagrams for efficient use of dimensional boards, and generate drawings to use as guides during assembly.

With plans in hand, the next step of the design process was to finalize details on the type of joinery, drawer slides, and fasteners for assembly of the cabinetry components. I decided to go with Festool’s Domino Tenon as my joinery of choice to assemble drawer boxes and other panels throughout the closet.

For drawer slides, I went with the Blum Tandem Drawer Slides with Blumotion Soft Close technology for the main drawer boxes. I also used LONTAN Soft Close Drawer Slides to mount inner drawer boxes within the main drawer boxes for the first and second row of drawers. For fasteners, I used varying sizes of wood screws and 15 gauge brad nails to assemble the cabinet carcass and install wood panels/trim.

To finish, we stained our rift cut white oak boards with Rubio Monocoat’s Oil Plus 2C Wood Finish to match the white oak cabinetry in other parts of our home. Lastly, Corston Architectural Sycamore Furniture Handles in antique brass finish were selected to perfectly complement the white oak cabinetry.

Construction

Prior to beginning construction, I assessed the plans to understand what tools were required to build the different components. The following is a list of tools I decided to go with.

I began by cutting boards for the cabinet carcass out of 3/4” pre-finished maple plywood, followed by boards for the drawer boxes which were cut out of 1/2” pre-finished maple plywood. Outward facing edges of the drawer box panels were then routed with a 1/8” bullnose bit for smooth and rounded edges.

Once all the pre-finished maple plywood panels were cut, I assembled the cabinet carcass in its final destination to avoid having to carry the unit up to walk-in closet which is on the second floor of our home. Once the carcass was in place, I proceeded to assembling the drawer boxes and mounted them into each bay within the carcass with Blum drawer slides.

After installation of the drawer boxes, I proceeded to cutting boards of 3/4” white oak plywood for the finish panels. Outward facing edges of the cut boards were then finished with white oak edge banding prior to being sanded and stained. The finished white oak boards were then assembled into their respective closet components including shelving on both sides of the closet, drawer face panels, and trim. For drawer face panel installation, C-Clamps were used to maintain 1/8” spacing between each panel.

Once all the components were installed in their respective places, we proceeded with applying wood filler on brad nail penetrations along trim panels and installed the drawer pulls onto the faces of the drawers.

If you’re wondering if there were any hiccups along the way, you are not wrong. With any project, there are always challenges that come up that aren’t planned for. With this project, the most notable issue we ran into was a snag in the most literal sense where the lack of space between drawer face panels and protruding levers on adjacent slides caused drawers to catch while opening and closing. We remediated the issue after some careful thought, which required some adjustment and re-fabricating of face panels.

All things considered, the end result was one, unique and beautiful walk-in closet! I could not be happier and prouder of the accomplishment my wife and I achieved as first-time cabinetry makers. I hope that this experience helps people like you take the leap into building great things for your home.

Until next time!
Build It Better

John Gutierrez