I have a bedroom in my house that I use as a guest room- since it has its own full bath. However, this room was lacking a closet. My solution was to build a large armoire for this room to serve as a closet.
I'm writing this several years after completing the project (about 6 after starting it), so some details have gotten a little fuzzy.
I started with some basic parameters. I wanted it to work as a closet for my guests, who included several 5'0" tall people. So I measured my regular closets and several items of clothing (long coats, my wife's dresses, etc) to see how tall the main section needed to be and how high off the floor the clothes bar could be. My wife and I both like the Arts & Crafts / Mission style, and since that fit with the oak I decided to go with that. I looked at several forms- one similar to the one I eventually built in Cherry for myself, but finally settled on one whose style is similar to the cherry bedside table from Plans Now.
I already had some oak that had been salvaged years before from a convent that was being restored. I decided to use the wall paneling (3/4" thick) for the side panels, and to glue together pairs of the old confessional doors for my doors. Combining the door dimensions with the numbers from the closets, I came up with my dimensions. Overall height would be dictated by the height of the doors, plus a large drawer under everything and some moulding (also salvaged) on the top. The 2 sections would come apart to make it easier to move.
I did several sketches/notes while designing it. Here are the ones that ended up getting used/somewhat used.
Pretty basic cabinet construction. Floating panel sides in a frame box. The whole unit is 2 boxes- a small lower box that holds the drawer and the large upper section that serves as the closet. Everything is solid oak except the bottom, back panel, and top of the upper section. The panels in the sides are undersized enough that if you slid them right you could pull one of the tounges out of its groove and look through the side. Since the wood's probably as dry/shrunk as it'll ever get (AZ does that), I allowed plenty of room for wood movement.
The oak framing is 6/4 red oak finished to 1.25". This thing is *heavy*. At one time I was planning on having 3 drawers sitting inside on one half. I eliminated them because they chopped up the interior too much. They'd have been a seperate unit as well to keep it in manageable pieces.
The part that took me the longest was the doors. I kept trying to figure out how to reuse the original panels from the confessional doors which were cut through to be a screen. Stopping this was my desire to have the doors be solid to keep out dust. After spending a year or so trying to figure out how to slice the original panels in half to glue to a backer board or cut a new panel, I came to the conclusion the design would be too busy and that a simple raised panel would be better.
One thing that went well was stripping the old finish off the crown molding. Trying to sand it would have taken hours, but using a french curve scraper did the job rather quickly. One thing that didn't go perfect was hanging the doors- they sagged a little and sometimes drag.
Watco "Golden Oak" under garnet Shellac. The panels in the sides were prefinished before installing in the frames, which was much easier than finishing them after would have been.
Overall I'm real happy with this piece. It looks great and serves its function. Now to build a nightstand and narrow table that match it to go in the room... Someday.
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