How to Make a Secret Door / Towel Rack

hey what's going on guys out to the zippy name for mister billet and in today's video I will show you how I build this towel rack that's disguise as a secret door to our utility room so that wasting time let's get into the video let's help the entire base of this cabinet shelf is made up of one $30 sheet of MDF the overall height of these shelves were just a few inches shy of being 8 feet tall now because I needed the four by eight sheet of MDF cut the long way and space is limited in my workshop I use my ACS track saw system from Craig to rip the large pieces down without hurting my back and then I handled the five smaller shelves on my table saw I assembled everything using good old-fashioned wood glue and a few Brad nails just to hold everything in place I then clamped the ends for 30 minutes together just to make sure there was enough clamping pressure for the wood glue and then reinforced all the shelves with countersunk into the four screws climb out of this war zone so I learned my lesson the hard way guys this is big so probably you do it on the ground don't do it in the workbench we're learning lessons all day long but the back of the shelves I decided to keep it simple and I just use a 15 dollar piece of quarter inch plywood a couple of reasons for it is number one this thing weighs a ton and it definitely doesn't need any more weight and reason number two just in case an emergency where somebody gets locked or trapped back there I could or they could just simply pry the quarter-inch plywood off and get out I don't know I am a dad I have to think of things like this no built-in shelves or cabinet for that matter is complete without a face frame typically the face frame is what makes a whole cabinet go from looking like a box to an actual piece of furniture but in our situation we will be asking even more from our face frames our face frames will be the key players to making sure this shelving unit swings safely and securely that is why I went with a solid wood like of 1 by 4 select fine I made sure the side pieces the Stiles as they are called come out long enough at the bottom to conceal our 2 inch casters as well as tall enough at top to make small adjustments in case something is out of square I secured all the rails or the horizontal side pieces of dual to the Stiles using the with glue and pocket screws so what's really great about this little Craig mini jig as you can see crates these per size pocket holes that are gonna be meant to attach the face frame to his cabinet is for the most part I've always used my Craig Foreman right they're very expensive worth every penny for creating these repetitive pocket holes in cabinet making but in this position I skip the step and I forgot to create my pocket holes for the face room so now I have to go and create those pocket holes now car obviously I can't bring this to that Foreman it's just too heavy it's too big so I picked this up 19 bucks guys 19 20 dollars at your local hardware store will get the job done it is by far one of the best tools I've had in the shop and that's probably how I got my start building so highly recommend go get yourself the Craig pocket hole jig once the face frames were built I attach them using the pocket holes that I created earlier on the outside of the base of the cabinet with a force plenty of wood glue or added support I plugged off all the pocket holes using these pre-made plugs from Craig using wood glue and patched up all the screw holes as well as the brad and holes using wood filler and sanding everything down flush using 120 grit sandpaper so now you're probably wondering are you painting it now no I'm not painting it yet what I'm doing is applying the primer now typically would especially MDF it acts like a sponge so as soon as you put paint on it it just gets absorbed and you're gonna waste pints over pints of paint to actually finish it off plus it actually chips after a while so it doesn't stick as well so I'm gonna use a water-based primer I've used this stuff for the longest time and I'm gonna put a couple of layers till the pores are clogged and then tomorrow I'll start painting it what's the primer dried I use the paintable called to finish off all the joints on the inside of the cabinet this will conceal any small gaps making the shelving cabinet look like one single piece the hidden hinges come with an easy-to-follow template which requires a center punch to mark out where you would use a drill bit to bore out the four holes inside the face frame with specific depth then using a palm router or a sharp chisel to remove the additional markings I used three hinges on this project recommended by a friend who has done similar thing before and the weight is not really a problem since the majority the cabinet's weight will also be supported on casters once the three hinge slots were cut out I cut out another three matching slots on a one by two piece of pine for attaching to the studs of the wall every project has its own set of hiccup some issues so let me show you what happened later in the build and they should that I had well folks you're not building if you aren't making a few mistakes so in this situation this door as you can see I had to narrow it down a little bit down to about eight inches or so reason why is I was a little too optimistic I made it 14 inches and that dummy myself hadn't even think about it if it's 14 inches deep there's no way this thing can swing open in fact they'd only like open it up by like three inches or so so by cutting it down to eight inches it swings open just perfectly so right now I'm just gonna go caulk the rest of these joints inside smoothly sand it a little bit and then we go throw some paint and then when I'm sorry do the install now for pain I'm using the same latex paint we used on our trim pieces and baseboards in our home it took me about three coats at most to finish off the shelving unit basically ended up using the entire quart of paint for just for this project for installation I first traced out the one by three piece that would attach the cabinet to the studs of the wall with all the hinges then I cut out all the drywall to expose the steps I secured the hinges using the provided screws [Music] once everything was lined up and moving properly I brought everything to the wall and secured the shelving unit to the wall studs using 3-inch screws now this goes without saying but it's a good idea to pre drill and countersink all the holes so that you don't split the 1 by 2 piece of wood as you're driving everything into the wall steps so I got this additional trim piece attached to kind of contour to the shape of this wall that's up by 1/8 up to the bottom 20/20 hindsight if I was to redo this project I would give myself a little more room here to allow for the depth of the cabinet to come out and so that's why I couldn't do anything about it so this solved this problem it worked just fine now the only thing left after concealed is the very top piece so I took a piece of MDF that's ready prime through a few pocket holes in there and then I'm doing magic to the sides and to the ceiling it will be ready for caulking now just like any other project there's a lot of lessons I learned on this one if I was to build this project the end the next time I would perhaps build a door frame first that way I could use shims to square up and line up any imperfections that were there probably from framing gaps this would perhaps make uh you know finished work go a lot smoother hey thanks so much for watching this video if you bring the channel and you like projects like this or this standing shower that I built recently which is the videos gonna be coming out soon make sure hit the subscribe button right over there tap the notification belt that will be alerted every time a video comes out like comment and share this video with your friends follow me on social media put links down description below to now this week we'll see you guys next week see ya bye