DIY Built-in Closet Organizer

Hey, what's going on guys? Alex here from Mr. Build It. And in today's video, we're going to take this ordinary bedroom closet and and turn it into that. So, without wasting time, let me show you how I made it and let's get into the video. Let's go. [music] All right, let's talk about the sponsor today's video, harrys.com. Do you find it frustrating lining up at the store to pay for overpriced blades that just keep irritating your skin? Every man deserves quality craftsmanship, simple design, and modern convenience. And a great shave. Harry's is a personal care brand that is reinventing the way you shave. Harry's manufactures its own razor blades in a factory in Germany. It's a world-class factory that's been making blades for 100red years. Refills are delivered straight to your door on your schedule, so no more waiting in lines at the drugstore. They support great causes, too. They give 1% of their sales to organizations that help promote better mental health care. It's an insanely good value with refills starting at only $2. Harry sent me their starter set which includes a weighted handle with textured rubber grip, five blade razor cartridge, foam shaving gel, and a travel cover to protect your blades when you're on the move. You'll be getting everything you need for a close comfortable shave. And you'll be supporting my channel by signing up. Redeem your trial set for just $3 when you go to harrys.com/mrbildit. Again, guys, make sure you go to harrys.com/mrbuild it to redeem your offer and join the 10 million who've tried Harry's. It's a new day. It's a new project. We are getting started on the built-ins for the nursery. The idea is organization, drawers. We don't know if we're having a boy or a girl, but I kind of want to sway towards making a little princess little dress up thing with a mirror. Anywh who, um, ideally material-wise, I usually build stuff, cabinetry stuff out of plywood, maple ply. I've said this stuff before. Since, uh, the closet already is MDF's built in, I might as well, you know, kind of go with that theme. It's strong enough. The drawers will be, uh, 1/2-in maple ply, probably birch. I've always used maple. I don't know. We'll see what we do. So, I'm going to pick up my MDF, uh,/2in maple ply for the drawers, some drawer slides, and then I think for the most part, I have everything else. So, let's get to work. [music] So, it's a little bit of sunny and it's a little a lot of clouds. Uh it's supposed to rain all day. Just up for a brief moment. Nothing scarier than trying to bring wood home uh and u not having a cover in the back of the truck. So, we'll see if this stuff gets We're going to do a little gambling. Let's see if it gets wet. We're already off to a really good start. No rain, wood is dry. Let's get building. All right, I seriously got lucky. It just started raining, so I got everything inside. Look, you can still see your little raindrops from on the MDF. So, we're going to rip this down into 17 [music] in nice long strips. I'm going to focus on making a cabinet down the middle. It's going to have drawers and dressers, all that stuff. So, I'm going to start, that's the most important part to keep actually square. That's why I'm doing it that way. Uh, I'm going to start ripping it up and then we're going to put in some pocket holes. That way, we can assemble everything with wood glue, pocket holes, um, maybe face frames. We'll see. Um, let's just let's just see what happens. Let's get started. Okay, so now that we got the long stuff cut, they are 17 in wide and 79 and 1/4 [music] in tall. That's not important because your closet is going to be different. But here's what is important. I need to make a couple of these shelves right here. They're going to be 17 in again deep and then 18 in wide. Let's make a couple of door uh shelves. Let's make a couple of shelves. Let's do that. All these boards 17 by8 are done. I'm going to use pocket holes to attach this to the side. So, I'm going to use this. Use my Craig jig foreman here. If you don't have a foreman, which not a lot of people do, they're kind of pricey. Uh you can use a mini Craig jig like this. It's 20 bucks. It gets the job done. Just takes a little bit of time. So, let's start throwing this thing on there and get some holes in there. All right. Just like any project, let's uh let's do some demo work. I'm not a I when I get excited about demo work, the reason I get excited is because it's your first opportunity to create like a blank canvas. When you have a blank canvas, you can usually get your imagination to start working. All right. So, we're going to start first with taking a utility knife and cutting all the caul out. All the shelves will make it a lot easier to take them off. They're really usually held by uh coaul uh 2in I think brad nails and sometimes wood glue, but very rare do they do that. So, we're going to [music] use this. Also, if you guys need help setting up your kind of home demo bag or home improvement kind of bag, I have [music] all the tools with affiliate links down description below of every video so you guys can take a look at what I have and uh any of my recommendations. Recommendations. That's the [music] re re I work too much. Let's get to work. You build me a nursery closet and I'll get you coffee. There you go. What are you thinking over here? I'm thinking like shelves in the middle and then cabinets and on the sides rods for hangers and then something kind of cool for the hamper. What do you think? Hamper, huh? Just, you know, a little something something can just be small and thick. You're going to need more of these. [laughter] As you can see, I'm using a large carpentry square here. Main reason why is it might look square here, and you know, you might set it here and be like, "Oh, that's 90°." But you also need to check the X and the Yaxis, and that way you know your shelf is not all catty wonkous. So, made a lot of mistakes before I learned that trick. 41. Checking [music] it for square. A little bit off. 40 and 1/2. 40 and 1/2. Okay. It's a beast. I am going to attach this scrap piece on the inside here to attach it to the studs of the wall. and to keep it from wobbling, obviously. After you got everything lined up. Mine's like 18 and 58 on each side. Once you got it lined up, measure from the bottom because right now it's still kind of swinging a little bit. And at that point, find where the previous studs walls are and then start securing these brackets to it. We'll put the shelves and do same thing there. So, let's make the structure now. Okay, so here's the issue that I'm running into. In [music] order to access the very top shelf here, this needs to be cut at an angle and then have the other shelf to be narrower. This one's about 12 in. Second issue I have is remember how in my previous videos I always say the walls are never really straight. Well, that goes even more so for the closets. [music] In the back over here, it's 57 inches. In the front over here, it's 56. The only way that I figure out to actually make this [music] work and get the shelves over there and make this cut is if I unsecure this entire unit, bring it back down, [music] make the cut, bring the board up first, and then take the cabinet. It's a lot of work, but you know what? That's what we stand up for. Let's just fire up the tools. Let's go. [music] Anytime [music] you're pulling brad nails out of a stud around a drywall is you want to use some kind of putty knife [music] and then your pliers to push away from it. So the pressure goes on the putty knife which distributes the pressure and doesn't put it on the drive. There's going to be so much less stuff I need to repair afterwards. So hope you guys enjoy that. I'm out of wood and the MS said I need to get another shelf. I got yelled at basically. No, I didn't get yelled at. She was really nice about it. I I thought we're going to put like a mirror in here for you know the kid grows up and it's a girl. [music] All fingers crossed. But it's a boy. We love him too. But put a little mirror. It would be like a cute little dress up thing. But she said it kind of in the meantime while they're little. It's kind of an awkward space. So think I'm going to split the difference. Put another shelf in there. This will be a little bit bigger. We can put little accessories, whatever. Only issue is I'm out of wood. So I need to go pick up like a smaller piece of [music] MDF to finish this off. It's funny how like I tapped into my scrap pile and still not enough. I would say this project so far, get two sheets of MDF. I think you'll be fine with two sheets. And while I'm there, I need to pick up one by two pine. We've done this before. Remember on this, excuse the mess on the built-ins right there. We're going to do the same way. So, we're going to do one by two of pine and we're going to brad nail it in and start patching things up and making it pretty. Let's go. I don't have any more MDF. Um store was added MDF, too. And I'm not going to jump to another store for MDF. Um I'm going to use plywood. I'm we're going to and we're going to conceal it with face prims anyway. So, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. [music] Made it. All right. So, everything's assembled and put together. Now, before we start building the actual drawers for this, we need to finish everything off. I'm going to use this product from DAP. It's the plaster basically for the walls, kind of like a drywall. Fix up all the stuff that was left from the previous shelf. Then I'm going to use one of my favorite actual stains from Minwax. The reason I like this stuff is because when it dries, [music] it's not as brittle as some of the other stuff. And lastly, when everything's finished and done, I'm put some uh paintable coaul all the way around. So [music] when we paint it, it's going to look like one built-in unit without any kind of imperfection. So let's get to putting this stuff on. All right, so everything's cocked and I'm getting ready to put the primer then the paint. Now, I want to share with you guys the primer that I always use. The one that I always use is Kilt. It's a water-based interior uh primer. Now, they're not sponsored of the project or anything like that. They're just it's just really easy to work with. It's not too thick. It the problem with some of the thicker ones, once you put it on, it kind of clumps up the rest of the paint. So, that's the primer. I'm going to roll it on one coat. What it does is it seals all the MDF. That way, it doesn't absorb like a sponge and it'll be ready. We'll have to use like a minimal amount of paint and that's it. So once that dries, lightly sand with 220 just to cut all the the raised fibers that kind of go to the top, get it nice and smooth. Then for paint, the product that I always always go with is the urethane emerald alcata. I always got to get it right. And the way I explain how that product works is latex paint is a water-based paint. It dilutes with, you know, plenty of washing with water. Anyhoo, you cut it or dilute it with water. The way I explain how this product works is it dilutes with water just like latex paint, but then through whatever the chemical black magic that goes through it, it hardens like an oilbased paint. So, super tough. So, when kids get their grease on and all that stuff, you can wash it off without having to compromise the paint that's floated. All right. So, I just got finished drawing up all the schematics for the actual drawers. They're going to be pretty deep. They're about 10 and 1/4 in [music] deep. Just mostly because I want to keep shirts and just good amount of clothing that can go in there. Now, I am going to make my cuts. They're going to be 16 in deep. Get everything ready for the insert for the bottom of the drawer. It's going to be a/4 in [music] uh birch ply, maple ply, whatever you have a quarter inch. And I've done this before in cabinet builds where we make a quarterin slot and then slide it in. You can use your table saw blade, but I also have a dado stack. All this is is a bunch of blades you can stack together, create the whatever thickness that you want. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to fire up my table saw and start mass-producing these drawers. So, I'm going to get some pocket holes on the outsides [music] and the insides. That way, it'll be included with like a face frame or the back of the drawer. And then I'll start putting everything together. And remember, when you put these together, make sure everything's square. Cuz if it's catty wonkous a little bit, you're going to have a hard [music] time putting this drawer on. And don't get me started about the face frames. not getting started about the face frame. All right, folks. Let's talk face frames. We're in the home stretch of this closet build. For face frames, we're going to go with a harder wood. This is a popular uh very easy and decently priced. Nothing too crazy. Now, the drawers are going to be roughly 11 in or the drawer faces are going to be roughly around 11 in tall, 18 in wide. All we're going to do, we're going to keep them very simple. Usually, we do something extravagant patterns, design [music] here. Pretty simple. I think we're just going to round over the edges. We're going to give them a nice clean sand. And from that point on, just really install them. I don't I don't I'm not inspired right now for a design. If I come up with something last minute, maybe we'll throw something on there. But in the [music] meantime, I just I feel like I'm just making a drawer right now. I just a drawer base frame and that's it. So, let's just let me [music] just do this. Okay. All right. So, we're in the home stretch. All I got left is to hang the drawer poles. These are nice [music] little simple black ones. The way I usually do it is I take some kind of straight edge and I'll mark the center by taking a [music] corner to corner and it'll intersect right there in the middle. Making sure you have a washer. That way you don't split your plywood on the other side. So easy peasy. [music] Hey, that is it for me this week. Thank you so much for sticking around watching this video. If you like projects like this or any other kind of home improvement project, including the reading nook that we recently built, make sure you hit that subscribe button right there and tap the notification bell. That way, you'll be alerted every time we put a video out. Remember, we're not trained professionals. We're not experts in the field. Nobody taught us this stuff. We're just a bunch of people who are not afraid to try and fail. Courage and sweat. That's what we stick to. [music] We need the courage to try these projects and the sweat, the hard work to get through, ask questions, and get better. Make sure you check me out on my social media is down below. Check out the mer section. Courage and sweat. that'll be reminded every single time you tackle on one of these projects. Remember guys, if I can do it, you can do it. Tune out this week. We'll see you guys on the next one. See you. Bye.