This pallet wood under bench storage cupboard was built back in April of this year to go under one of Shalini’s workbenches. The criteria was that it should be on castors so it could easily be moved about, fit comfortably under her workbench and have two doors.
I had never tackled anything this ambitious before so it was a learning project, a sort of leap into the dark and see what transpires. Like most things I do, there is no set plan or set dimensions, stuff sort of just evolves from an idea in my mind as was the case with this piece.
The first job was to select the planks from the de-nailed pallet wood I had to hand, fortunately I had a decent selection of similar sizes. Once these were collected together they needed to be sanded, in my case this was with a belt sander and a dust mask. This was a long and messy task but work doing looking at the finished result.
Initial thoughts were to make the base first and then let the whole thing sort of grow from the ground up so to speak. So that’s what I did, cut two long and 3 shorter pieces to make the base, then go those all screwed together. Then cut and fitted the planks for the floor of the cabinet, the back, sides and top followed quite quickly after that. Making alterations and allowances as I went along so everything fitted reasonably snugly together.
Doors for the under bench storage cupboard
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for me was the making and fitting of the doors, this provoked much head scratching for me as I hadn’t done anything like this before! I had the dimensions of the hole that had to fit into so I built a frame and then offered it up to the cabinet to ensure it would fill that whole reasonably well, fortunately it did.
The next job was to cut pieces of pallet wood to fit into the frame, these would go between the longer pieces and be glued in vertically. So after having done this I was now left with one big panel that would fit the hole at the front of the cabinet.
At this point I formulated my devious plan of how to end with two reasonably fitting doors that didn’t have a huge gap between them when closed! This involved first fitting the hinges to the big panel I had and then fitting that panel to the cabinet. Yes I know the doors won’t open at this point but I did it like this so I could make off were I wanted to cut the panel in half vertically thus giving me two good fitting doors and this is what I did and I think it worked pretty well.
Next job was to turn the cabinet upside down and fit the castors, one on each corner. The cabinet has now been in use for a while and serves the purpose it was made for pretty well.
The cost to build this under bench storage cupboard on castors wasn’t very much at all, in fact the only direct cost was 4 castors and two hinges, maybe 5 pounds tops. It was a challenging project to do to but I learnt a lot in the process and enjoyed it a lot.