Laundry Room Cabinets

I recently had a 4 day weekend, so I decided it was time to tackle some cabinets to replace the wire shelving in our laundry room. These are made from 3/4 oak ply with red oak face frame and raised panel doors. Dimensions are 33.25W x 12D x 20H. Although not pictured, the side and center panels have shelf pin holes and I also made shelves out of plywood with hardwood fronts. They are hung with french cleats, which work amazingly well. The cabinets lift right off the wall while at the same time being plenty stout enough to support them fully loaded.

This is the third set of cabinets I’ve built and I can see my skills improving. This time around I decided to forgo the stacked dado and made all the rabbets and dados with a router and I must say I like this method better. It saves a lot of time using a dado jig vs wasting tons of time messing around with shims. Thanks to my new Osbourne miter gauge, I also made all the cuts using my table saw instead of switching over to my miter saw to cut pieces to length. Everything fit perfectly and it was a very satisfying experience.

The hangers below the cabinet were an afterthought that I made after the cabinets were already assembled and hung. I hadn’t realized that I wouldn’t have anywhere to store hangers once I got rid of the existing wire shelf. The “brackets” and dowels are both also red oak. I made the dowels on my router table by ripping pieces of wood 3/4” square and then rounding over the edges. It really made me wish I had a lathe I could chuck it in to sand it, as doing it by hand took a while.

The finish is two coats of Minwax Polyshades “Classic Oak” This is the first time I’ve used a combo stain/polyurethane and I was very happy with the results.