Thread: Building Clothing Units AKA Help the Novice

Stick with 16mm melamine faced chipboard. Using ply will roughly double your costs, not including time for sanding, sanding, sanding, sanding, sanding and painting.

A sheet of 2400x1200 melamine faced board will cost you about $35-40; reasonable castors will be about $6-10 each.

HOWEVER...your biggest problem will be the unit racking (going out of square) if you don't have some form of bracing on the nominal 'back' of the unit.

It's easy to make a nice right angle join with two pieces of 16mm board; getting it to stay as a right angle under a force is another matter entirely. I would suggest diagonal corner braces at the very least, and something like a 100mm rail across the top/bottom of the front/back as a better alternative.

Thanks Master Splinter.

Would there be any merit in putting another board half way down and having a smaller rail either side of it to spread the load? Also, as I'm trying to keep the overall height to a minimum whilst still having to allow for the length of the clothes, is there an alternative to bulky castors? I would hazard a guess that using more smaller castors wouldn't hold the weight, or would this be okay? Tracks would be good (as I'm putting these units under a larger structure) however I'm guessing this would be considerably more expensive and possibly raise issues with the sheer size of the pull out hanging units.

hi Courtney, welcome

as advised above your best bet is melamine board

depending on the tools you have, the cheapest option might be to get a kitchen company to cut and edge band all the pieces for you
you would then need to screwit all together, keeping it square as you progress.

Welcome Courtney,

I see some potential issues with your plans, but this may be my interpretation, rather than your concept.

1. Drawer boxes. Do these have to be backless, or is this limited to the hanger bays? The onlys reason for making the drawer boxes backless would be to save on material ( a poor economy) or to make the drawers accessible from front and back. This can be done if essential, but the drawer slides required are rare and expensive. Having a back will provide a lot of support for the ends and lock them in place, ensuring that the ends will not flex as the units are moved on castors.

2 Hanger bays. You seem to need these open front and back for access. This can be done but you would need to something to provide alternative support sonewhere in the design to replace that which a back would provide. Your melamine or other panel material is reasonable strong and resistant to bending as a flat panel, but woefully prone to end grain splitting if you simply screw an end panel into the end of a top and bottom to fabricate the box. A back panel screwed into the top bottom and both ends would stiffen the structure considerably.

However, if you can organise the top and bottom to be torsion boxes (two spaced panels with infills between them) then you can arrange seperated screwlines into both panels at the top and bottom. This makes the end panels rigid at the top and bottom and the structure more rigid.

Another possible option might be to add a faceframes to the completed frame to ensure that the top, bottom and end panels cannot flex, providing support at the screwlines. However the faceframes would intrude into storage may which may not be desirable.

3. Castors. What surface do you expect to operate on, this will have an effect on the ability to roll the units, and the required castor sizes. A typical drawer unit could easily weigh in around 50kg or more empty, and accomodate a similar load. I would be very shy of putting a load of that proportion onto a typical carpet/underfelt floor covering, or even a polished timber floor through 4 castors as the castors would settle into the surface when stationary, and cause excessive stretching, wear and scruffing when moving. Also with backless carcasses, castor friction when rolling the units will tend to collapse the carcasses when rolling in an end to end direction, as the natural approach is to push/pull the unit from a position roughly level with your elbows, (i.e near the top of the cabinet), rather than near the base.

I suspect that you will need fairly large industrial style castors, but within reason, these can be enclosed in skirts in the base of the cabinets, enclosing them may cause limited stability if swivel castors are used as the castors would need to be inset a fair way inside the skit to allow free swivelling without clashing with the skirt material.

Hope this helps

Hi malb,

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply. The idea of backless drawers amuses me greatly, as that is bizarre and I'm not sure what I said to convey that. I definitely intend of having backs! My drawer units would essentially be the same as a bedside table however movable. The hanging racks however would not be fully enclosed. A little hard to describe with only words but it would essentially be 110cm of hanging rod with solid sides, top and bottom and an open back and front. I guess I could put a back on them if need be, it just wasn't what I'd originally planned.

To give you guys a better idea of my overall plan (I wasn't going to share it because I understand it's not to everyone's tastes and I didn't want the thread to derail about the general concept), my plan is to build a raised bed frame at 1m from the floor plus mattress height. Below this I will have the units underneath on either side, of which the rack units would pull out from the short side to access the hanging clothes. I had initially planned on having the drawer units pull out and the drawers then come out sideways, as seen in this video, however given that they will not be deep, I'm thinking it will be much easier and more cost effective to just have the drawers open outward like a regular drawer would.

Here is a pic of the rack idea.

The 'backless drawers' comes from drawer nomenclature...the front of a drawer is always the bit you pull on to open the drawer regardless of how the content is orientated or accessed...so your design has a solid back and front, but open sides rather than an open front and back and solid sides!


Some suggestions based on that under bed storage pic....

Have a low edge (50-100mm) around the mattress to confine it and stop it slipping off the melamine (it's pretty slippery stuff).

Hide the castors for the roll-out wardrobe units inside the bottom of the unit (think of a drawer shape...but turned upside down) ...castors will probably take up about 80-100mm depth, so make the bottom as a bottomless box that's maybe 15mm short of the depth of the castors (ie if the castors are 100mm from the mounting plate to the bottom of the castor, make the box side 85mm deep).

This'll hide the castors as well as giving you a nice solid plinth that you can attach the sides to. If you then make the sides as torsion boxes as malb said, they'll be nice and rigid but you can leave the insides open to provide some shelving to put small stuff on.

Hi Phoenix

I think the pull out drawers / hanging units you want to make use a combination of fixed 30+kg castors to help support the weight and slides like these



what you have in mind might be a little unusual, but it's not crazy

by the way, the units shown in the video have a quite heavy duty construction to keep them rigid when moved