Master Closet Organizer

My dresser accumulates pants and shirts in no patricular order and I would mostly just manage them in a pile or two, never really putting them on a hanger or shelf elsewhere. This was not ideal visually and also was annoying because the pile was a combination of regular pants, and clothes I would wear for dirty jobs around the house. It was sometimes challenging to find the right thing. I needed to solve this mess and I was going to use a partition of the closet that used to have hanging clothes. I need more shelf space than hanging clothes space.

That hanging clothes space was already being inefficiently used for a bunch of things: shirts I needed to hand wash; my short-trip traveling duffle bag; and some shirts I seldom use but want to keep. I wanted an organizer that had a small hamper, a place for the duffle bag and a bunch of shelves so I could separate the shirts and pants into categories.

I went with a simple design using all plywood pieces. Most would be 3/4'' plywood, but the front and back of the hamper area would be 1/2'' plywood and the shelf backing would only be 1/4'' plywood. I used some glued dado joins with screws and the backing boards to add rigidity. I cut most of this out of a 4 ft. x 8 ft. piece of wood, though there were plenty of spare pieces after cutting.

I chose to give one coat of paint to the main surface areas so that I could sand the roughness that occurs after the first coat as easily as possible. Since I would using glue as well as screws, I needed to mask off the glued surfaces (of which there were a lot).

After assembly, I wanted to have all the edges and screw holes caulked so that it would better seal things and have a better visual appearance (even though no one is ever likely to care). I put on the second coat of paint fairly heavy in hopes that I would not need to add a third coat. Two coats turned out to be enough.