Hey guys! Today I’m sharing a quick and easy tutorial from our last house, Kinsey’s bedroom specifically, that can easily be applied to any reach-in closet. The tutorial of the day – how to build your own closet built-ins using a Billy bookcase from Ikea, a few pieces of MDF, several 1x2s, and a clothing rod.
Here’s the before picture. Basically, a completely empty closet. The closet originally had one long clothing rod and a shelf on top.
The very first thing I did before I started any built-ins was to paint the closet (Stucco by Sherwin Williams). Now I have a fresh clean surface to work with.
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Building the closet is really easy. Assemble your Billy bookcase per the directions with the shelf. For this closet I purchased a tall narrow one (15 3/4x11x79 1/2″). Place the shelf exactly where you want it in the closet and anchor it to the wall using the enclosed anchor.
Now take your 1x2s and cut them the length of the back wall from the wall to the edge of the shelf. This will be the height of your clothing rod as well as the back support for the shelf on top of the rod. Here’s a great image for the standard height to hang your clothing rod.
I hung my rods on the right at 42″ and 84″, and the rod on the left a little lower at about 65″.
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You will also need 1x2s vertical below your horizontal piece so that you can attach your rod bracket to it. Each vertical 1×2 I cut just a bit longer than my bracket.
Next step, attach your shelf and rod bracket to the vertical 1x2s. For the inside of the closet against the wall, I attached a 1×4 horizontally to act as a support for the shelf on top. It also supports the pole socket.
Once my brackets and sockets were attached, I measured, cut the wooden clothing rods to length, and installed them. To keep them from slipping out of the brackets I screwed each rod to the underside of the rod bracket using a short wood screw.
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From there I cut my 1/2″x11″ MDF sheets to the correct length, added them to the top of each clothing section, and nailed them into place using my Ryobi nail gun.
A quick coat of primer and white paint on all the exposed wood, and you now have professional built-ins that you completed in only a couple hours, all while saving hundreds of dollars!
I prefer using a Billy bookcase instead of an Expedit or Kallax because of the ability to adjust the shelves to any height. I also like that you can purchase additional shelves for the Billy to create even more storage room.When I first started imagining how I wanted my closet to look, I became stuck on this image of Jenny Wolf’s closet. I absolutely adored the blue, custom cabinetry and decided I was going to figure out a way to get a similar look in my own house with a non-custom budget.
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I initially assumed that we would make all the cabinetry from scratch, but Cory brought me back to reality with the truths that 1) we’d never built a cabinet in our lives, let alone lots of drawers, shelves and boxes, and 2) the cabinetry would take
So, I sought out a closet system that I could customize and paint to match my vision. And in this search, the IKEA Pax kept coming up as the most common, highest-rated, and budget-friendly closet system. I’m no stranger to the concept of hacking IKEA products, though we actually had never done it ourselves. In my research, I discovered that lots of people have hacked the IKEA Pax or IKEA Billy systems to create a built-in look. But there were some upgrades that I wasn’t able to find any examples of in the wild, including recessing in-cabinet lighting and adding drawer fronts for an inset, full custom cabinetry look. The drawer fronts were critical to my vision: the IKEA Pax drawers look very modular and modern to me, making them stick out like a sore thumb in our 1940’s home. Most people hid the drawers by adding doors on the wardrobe units, but we didn’t have the space, or the desire to add so many unnecessary cabinet doors to our space.
In order to achieve the high-end custom look I envisioned, we added baseboards, crown moulding, shoe moulding, recessed puck lights for in-cabinet lighting, refaced the fronts and sides of the wardrobe units with wood strips, added wood drawer fronts, added plugs to cover the unused shelving holes, wallpapered the back of the units, primed and painted everything, then swapped out the metal hanging rods for stained wooden rods, and finally added drawer hardware.
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We tried to be as detailed as possible in the below steps, so I’m going to give a disclaimer that this post is massive. Let me know in the comments if anything needs further clarification and I can update to address those questions.
This is where the Pax Planning tool on the IKEA website comes in handy. We cataloged how much space we each needed for our clothes (High, Medium, Low) and storage type by clothing category in a spreadsheet, and then I referenced it as I created each of our sides of the closet to ensure we had enough space for our existing wardrobe items and our storage preferences. For instance, I fold my jeans, while Cory prefers to hang his, and he dresses business casual for work, meaning there’s a lot of shirts to hang. When it came to choosing accessories, I opted out of the slightly gimmicky IKEA accessories, like the pants hanger, the shoe trees, etc. in favour of clean, classic closet designs. This isn’t to say that they aren’t helpful to maximize storage, but it’s very challenging to make them look seamless in a high-end custom closet. This limited our options down to hanging rods, drawers and shelves.
For reference, the room is 14.6′ long by 6.5′ wide, and we opted for the deeper IKEA Pax units on one side (23″ deep) and shallower units on the other wall (13″ deep), which allowed for a wide walkway between the two units.
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We only have standard 8” ceilings, so we had to build the units in the room and also couldn’t build a platform for the wardrobe units to sit on. If we had higher ceilings we would have elevated the units on a wooden base to ensure that we weren’t losing any potential storage space when we added baseboards. We shimmed under the units to ensure they were completely level, ensuring that the units were level to one another, so when we ran the baseboards across the front of them, everything looked flush.
We ordered these puck lights off Amazon and hardwired them into an electrical box, so we could switch them on and off when entering the room. In order to reach all six of our closet units, we had to order extra extension cords. We fed these cords in a chain, where for each unit, one light branched off and fed into the unit from the very top in the back. Because we knew we were going to have rattan boxes on a top shelf, we knew the cords would be invisible.
In order to make the lights look very custom, we recessed them into the front of the top shelf in every unit. To recess the lights, we used a router to trace a template we made in a scrap piece of wood. If we had more time, we would have used a Kreg Concealed Jig with a Forstner Drill Bit for a more perfect round circle, but they look pretty great. We set a routing depth equal to the thickness of the puck light, so it would be completely flush with the lower surface of the shelf.
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Once we routed the holes for the lights, we drilled a hole straight through to accommodate the cord for the puck light itself. Then we installed the shelf and ran the puck light through it on each unit. We used a small bead of construction adhesive on the back of the puck light to secure it into the recessed hole in the shelf. Once all the lights were installed, we moved on to the next step.
Next up, was installing the baseboards to the front of the units. We ran the baseboards all the way around the room, for a fully-built in look. We used these baseboards from Metrie, which are part of their Fashion Forward collection and play very nicely with applied wood trim. Because the top of the baseboard profile is flat horizontally, it allows the wood that we applied later on to the fronts of the cabinetry to flow seamlessly.
We attached the baseboards to the front of the wardrobe units with construction adhesive, and added nails where the baseboards sat flush with the vertical sides of each individual wardrobe unit. If your floors are not level (old house problems), always start
