You’ve had to wait a few weeks to see the completed closet that was started back in this post. Thank you for your patience. The only things left to do were build the drawers, install the doors and make a final choice on how to handle the walls being offset and the exposed broken tile in front of the base cabinet.
The drawers were simply a matter of cutting up some of the same pre-laminated 3/4″ plywood I used for the shelves and inserting some 1/4″ pre-laminated plywood for the drawer bottoms. With the nice ball-bearing slides I knew the corner joints wouldn’t take much of a beating but I cut some simple lock joints just to be sure nothing separates over time.
I opted to save some money and got MDF doors. In theory, this should have meant that they were extremely straight. Once I got the special-order doors home and removed the blocking that prevents them from moving during shipping the left-hand one curved itself back into its natural shape. Rats! Those turkeys at the factory knew they had a crap door but installed it anyway. I could ship it back and wait several weeks for replacements or just live with the slight curve knowing that it would probably never get any worse. I took the path of least resistance – especially since I had to sign papers accepting the delivery as is at the store.
I painted the doors and finished them off with glass knob hardware I’d scavenged off other unused doors we had in the garage.
The last challenge was dealing with the floor at the front of the closet. As I mentioned previously, whoever walled in the original closet didn’t build the new wall to the right length. This meant that the corner was not square. It wasn’t terrible but with nice parallel wood flooring and perfectly square tile at the base of it, it was eye catching. On top of that, the loose and broken part of the tile extended out past the base cabinet leaving exposed concrete flooring. My answer to all of this was to build a wooden threshold like you’d see on an exterior door out of a piece of oak. After shaping it, I just polyurethaned it and it matches the rest of the floor nicely.
So that is that. We really love having this extra storage. It is wonderful to be able to put all of our towels and sheets in one location and still have room to store lots of other stuff.
Jason Patz 