Instructions / Assembly

How to build a closet using melamine

What is melamine?

While real wood is strong and beautiful, building a closet organizer with it is expensive and time-

consuming. Melamine products are an attractive and inexpensive alternative to wood or plywood. These

boards, panels and sheets are made of particleboard with a tough, factory-applied melamine finish

similar in appearance to plastic laminate. A 4 x 8-ft. melamine sheet is about half the cost of cabinet-

grade plywood .

Example Closet:

Overall dimensions: 77-1/4′ wide x 96′ tall x 15-3/4′ deep

 This closet has a 9-ft. ceiling, so we built 8-ft. cabinets. If your ceiling is lower, adjust the cabinet

height as necessary.

Choose your hardware first

If you’re planning to install accessories, be sure to buy them before you build the cabinets. Some wire

baskets for example, may require a 24-in. opening, while the shoe shelf rails might need a 29-1/2-in.

opening to allow for the width of the shoe shelves (with rails installed) plus the shelf pins.

Prevent chip-out

You can cut melamine with a circular saw and regular woodcutting blade, but its brittle faces are prone

to chipping out. To minimize this problem, use a 60-tooth, carbide-tipped blade and apply masking tape

to the top side of your workpiece wherever you make a cut.

Make perfect cuts every time

One of the challenges of using a handheld circular saw is making perfectly straight and square cuts. For

our project, we used a self-squaring crosscut jig for cuts across panels, and a longer jig for cutting long,

narrow pieces like the hanging strips. These jigs also help reduce chip-out. The jig shown here is just a

narrow piece of 3/4-in. plywood glued on top of a wider piece of 1/4-in. plywood, and it has a squaring

fence on the bottom. Learn how to make similar jigs.

Edge banding hides the ugly

The finished faces of melamine panels look great, but the raw edges don’t. You might be able to build

your organizer without having to apply any edge banding at all if you orient the raw edges so they’re not

visible once the organizer is installed. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to apply iron-on edge banding,

which is available at any home center. Be sure to buy an edge trimmer.

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How to build a closet using melamine What is melamine? While real wood is strong and beautiful, building a closet organizer with it is expensive and timeconsuming. Melamine products are an attractive and inexpensive alternative to wood or plywood. These boards, panels and sheets are made of particleboard with a tough, factory-applied melamine finish similar in appearance to plastic laminate. A 4 x 8-ft. melamine sheet is about half the cost of cabinetgrade plywood .
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How to build a closet using melamine Drill pilot holes We assembled each of the three cabinet boxes for our closet organizer by first drilling pilot holes with countersinks and then driving 1-3/4-in. coarse-thread screws. These screws are designed to be selfdrilling, but the particleboard in melamine has a tendency to crumble and blow out easily, so drilling pilot holes is worth the effort.