How to build a fitted wardrobe
As part of my guide to buying a flat, I thought I would detail some of the modifications I have made to the property since moving in. One of them was building a fitted wardrobe. So you want to build a fitted wardrobe rather than buying a flat pack fitted or stand alone wardrobe? I hope you are prepared!
Our bedroom is an odd shape with quite high ceilings and a recessed wall by the door. It measures 2.47m high by 2.54m wide, by 0.50m deep. We currently have an Ikea flat pack stand alone wardrobe, which juts out of the room a pointless 0.70m, and is dark blue and fairly over powering. We decided, in order to best use the space, a fitted wardrobe from ceiling to floor, cut to just the depth of a clothes hanger would make the room feel larger and lighter. We decided on the following process:
- Build 4 ladder style wooden struts, 30cm shy of the ceiling
- Place a shelf the width and depth of the space (247x50 cm)
- We would get 3 identical spaces for shelving (50x50 cm) and one 80x50cm space for 2 hanging rails, one ontop of the other
- The wooden struts, 2 of which were 4.4cm wide and 2 were 6.8cm wide accounted for the remaining space
- Three wooden slats, one at the back in the centre, two at the front (top and bottom), running the width of the structure to provide lateral support
- various wooden slats (running the depth of each supporting strut) providing horizontal support and keeping the supporting posts the same depth (50cm) apart.
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I know this is probably fairly difficult to visualise so I have produced the following diagrams:
If you are planning to build a fitted wardrobe, make sure you have all the correct tools too! We had such a wide variety of tools - and each one was invaluable. I have ordered the list below from the most to the least important, but don't under estimate how useful they all are!:
- Electric Screwdriver - absolutley vital! I used over 80 screws, doing each by hand would have taken a very long time and given me a very sore wrist!
- Power Drill - Again, Vital - without this you will never get the damned screws in
- Electric Saw - This was vary useful for the top shelf. Cutting a 2m length of board by hand would have been very tiring!
- Electric plane - Not so important for building a wardrobe - if you have pre-planed wood. Unfortunately, we didn't
- Jigsaw - very useful if you want to curve the wood to fit around a skirting board, dado rail or picture rail.
- Standard tool kit including pencil, ruler, tape measure, hammer, hand screwdriver (for finishing screws)
Tools we didn't have which would have been useful would have been a set square (some of the ends of the wooden struts were a bit dodgy!) A work mate of desk to cut the wood, and most importantly a clamp - drilling into the end of a 2.5m length of wood is pretty tricky if you can't hold it in place!
We used the following materials:
- 4x(18mmx38mm)pine planks - support
- 4x(36mmx68mm)pine strutts - main support beams
- 4x(44mmx44mm)pine strutts - main support beams
- 2x(690mmx18mm)MDF board - top shelf
- 2x(690mmx14mm)MDF board - other shelves
- 2x(690mmx14mm)MDF board - other shelves
- 30x40mm, 50x50mm and 50x60mm chipboard screws
- 2x(1200mx20mm) steel tubing - for clothes rails
- 4x rail attachments
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