Who has good DIY storage wall cabinet plans

[kmacht]

After moving into a new house this past spring I am finally fed up with working out cardboard boxes filled with my tools and am ready to start setting up the shop. In my old place I found a great deal on some old kitchen wall cabinets and used them for storage. A search of craigslist the past few weeks doesn't seem to be turning up anything that will fit my budget. Most are either solid oak and a fortune or beat up and falling apart from carelessly taking them down. I figured someone on here must have good plans to build your own wall cabinets. I could design some up but figured why re-invent the wheel. Something that has a cut list to minimize the amount of scrap lumber when buying 4x8 sheets of plywood and doesn't require fancy dado blades or complicated joints is what I'm after. Post up what you have.

Keith

 

[GLTHFJ60]

Do you have a Habitat ReStore near you? I usually have good luck at places like that.

 

[BSTON]

What's the budget and what are you going to store in them? If you're just looking for kitchen cabinet style storage, the price on new cabinets from Ikea isn't too bad.

 

[DC73]

I was headed down the same road as the OP until Home Depot put their unfinished oak cabinets on sale for 20% off. Even thought I still could have built cabinets for less, it was worth buying them to save a lot of labor that I put to use in better ways. It took me less than 2 full days to pick up the cabinets, install them and paint them. I'd have been a few weeks building my own.

HD puts their cabinets on sale for 20% off at least a couple of times per year.

DC

 

[kmacht]

If I could do it for $50 or less per cabinet that would be ideal. I have more time than money to spend on the project so buying pre-made ones for $100+ each isn't what I'm looking for. The cabinets will be used to store hand tools (circular saws, drills, ets) as well as miscellaneous hardware. They don't have to be heavy duty but probably need to be better than press board cabinets from ikea.

Keith

 

[Dr Stan]

In this neck of the woods a local cabinet shop builds unfinished oak/MDF cabinets at a very reasonable rate. Don't know where you are located, but if its anywhere near Fordsville, KY that is the location of the shop. When I was rehabing the lower portion of the living room I bought new, but returned fiberglass French doors for $300. At Lowes, HD, etc they were $1000+

 

[bullnerd]

This was posted recently, might be worth a look.

http://www.tomclarkbooks.com/Practical_Shop_Cabinets.html

 

[IslandBikeCo]

I cant say that I have plans but they are pretty straight forward. Glued and screwed 12inch MDF shelving cut to make the boxes and shelves. 1x4 MDF for the face frames. There is also a 1x6 cleat in the back to help keep them square and to screw into the studs. I am moving so they are pretty much empty now but they held mostly autofluids, lawn chemicals and various tools. Doing it again I would lose the adjustable shelves and just make them fixed.I never did get around to making the doors.

 

[ford fanatic]

I just picked up my second kitchen from a for sale site off Facebook. 8 upper and 8 lower cabinets with lots of drawers, quartz countertop with built in sink for $500. They're in really good shape, nice hinges and not all beat up. I now have about 25 cabinets total, 16 maple and the rest oak for a total of $1100. You just have to be patient...

 

[Frank Dukes]

these has been on my to do list for quite some time.

http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=186358

 

[Freejack]

Here are some cabinets I made:

Out of a full 3/4" sheet of plywood, you can get 2 cabinets, but will only have enough left for a partial door on one cabinet. I use that space to house stuff that is too deep to fit behind the door, like the oil jugs.

Joints are simple pocket-holes. Rear (not show above) is 1/4" plywood rabbited in so that it is flush with the frame.

Here is a pic of the finished product.

Jake

 

[sctattooer]

Call around the local renovation contractors, and leave them your name and number. I did this and got 2 full kitchen cabinet sets for 200 bucks when they renovated a condo building. Uppers and lowers. Had to wait about 3 months for them but totally worth it

 

[engineer2]

I was thinking about this for my garage. Not my idea, found it online.

 

[regguy1]

Consider this: http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=65557

 

[engineer2]

Nice, Rodney!

 

[BSTON]

If you shrink down the cabinet from Freejack to 1' 5-7/8" x 11-7/8" then you can fit 4 of them in two sheets of 4x8" and get full overlay doors.

 

[yhprum]

Aussie Dans were good. http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=186358&highlight=aussie+dan+cabinets

 

[BSTON]

I went a little overboard at work and figured this out. 4' 3/4" wide x 2' 11-1/2" tall x 1' 3-1/2" deep with a shelf and two doors. It fits on 3 sheets of 3/4" 4x8 plywood with not a whole lot of waste. The back isn't completely closed in but a good chunk of it is.

Front

Front (no doors)

Rear

Sheet Layout

 

[Voi]

This was posted recently, might be worth a look.

http://www.tomclarkbooks.com/Practical_Shop_Cabinets.html

I believe I've borrowed that book before. He has some neat ideas about being practical with shop cabinets.

As I recall one of his ideas is using strips of cut off plywood as face frame material if one prefers or feels more comfortable with a face-framed design. Might be a good idea for the OP since he mentioned not wasting his sheet goods.

I built my own shop cabinets because I like my uppers much deeper than standard. I had some salvaged cabinet doors from our remodel and I just built the boxes around them.

 

[_Stang_]

I built the ones shown on Family Handyman with a 2x2 ladder frame layout and 3/4" birch in my old garage and they turned out very well. I made them 24" deep and tied into the ceiling joists so they were tall as well. So strong I could have slept up in there. First time I ever used headlok structural screws which are absolutely amazing. I would never again use anything else to hang cabinets, TV mounts, etc.

http://www.familyhandyman.com/garage/storage/installing-large-garage-cabinets/amp


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[Freejack]

If you shrink down the cabinet from Freejack to 1' 5-7/8" x 11-7/8" then you can fit 4 of them in two sheets of 4x8" and get full overlay doors.

Hey that is pretty cool! The size of mine were initially determined by an oil drain pan as part of my oil-change cabinet, so I just kept building them uniform, but what you've come up with is definitely more efficient!

Here is the first one I did:

Jake

 

[Slednut]

Lots of good ideas.

You can make custom cabinets that will fit your space. I make all the shelves 48 or 31 and 1/2 inches wide and less than 12 inches deep for upper cabinets. This will give you 8 shelves from one piece of ply wood because each cut takes up almost 1/8 inch of material. For lower cabinets I like a deep top so I go with a little under 32 inches deep and high and 4 feet or 31 and ½ inches wide. A little less than 32 inches will give you three per sheet. I then build a base to get it the height I want. I just rip ply wood (that has no gaps) for the face frames. For doors I use ½ inch melamine and simply paint the edges. This way I don’t have to paint the doors and they are easy to clean and replace if one gets ruined.

The cabinets that are high in the pics are 24 and 32 inches deep with the face frame.

If you don’t want to do dados get a pocket hole jig. These are nice because you don’t have to wait for the glue to dry to continue building.

 

[M35A2]

I have a cabinet shop and these are a couple excel calculators that I use to cut simple garage cabinets out of 3/4" material. You can input you height, depth with doors, width and quantity and it will produce your cultist. They are a simple glue and screw **** joint cabinet. Usually we build out of 3/4" Melamine and this is using Blum Euro hinges drilled at 4mm backseat and mounted on 0mm plates. We cut on a CNC router so all shelf pin, screw holes and hinge holes are drilled so this is just a basic cutlist. You can download them here, there I one for uppers and 1 for lowers.

I am actually in the process of redoing my garage now but work is busy so have not had much time to finish, here is a work in progress pic.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qd5j1f1zfu1qctc/Base Cabinet Single Door Cutlist.xlsx?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7tu3cuo6yr9yqu9/Upper Cabinet Single Door Cutlist.xlsx?dl=0

 

[BSTON]

I just realized that I made a mistake and only had 1 set of the back braces on my cabinet design on the sheet layout. I modified it a bit and added the second set. Now there's even less waste!

 

[larry4406]

I just realized that I made a mistake and only had 1 set of the back braces on my cabinet design on the sheet layout. I modified it a bit and added the second set. Now there's even less waste!

How about sharing the updated diagrams and cut sheets? Nice job by the way. I have this exact project on my to do list and very much like how this thread is going. Have you built one yet?

 

[BSTON]

How about sharing the updated diagrams and cut sheets? Nice job by the way. I have this exact project on my to do list and very much like how this thread is going. Have you built one yet?

I updated my original post to get the correct parts on the layout sheet. I have not built this cabinet. I just came up with the plans as a challenge to see what kind of yield I could get from the plywood. In my opinion, it's a better design than the smaller cabinet that I posted first. Mostly because of the additional 3-1/2" depth.

The shortcoming of this design is that it's less flexible with the location of the shelf. It requires changes to 4 different parts if you want the shelf at a different height. It will be a ridiculously sturdy cabinet if you keep tolerances though. I'd personally prefer a shelf on moveable pegs (like a normal kitchen cabinet) but I realize that most people don't have the equipment or patience to drill all of the holes for the pegs at accurate locations.

I'll gladly share more dimensions if anyone wants. I just won't be able to get to it this morning.

 

[eastbaysubaru]

I was thinking about this for my garage. Not my idea, found it online.

I built custom sized versions of these for my garage and they've been great. The design is from The Family Handyman magazine but they're posted online somewhere as well.

-Brian