Woodwork Furniture I

There are four items that can be referred to as woodwork furniture:

• Kitchen cabinets - already described in the Kitchen page
• Bathroom
• Wardrobe closet
• Ceiling cabinets
• Table

The task

According to my floor plan, I needed to make the combined bathroom-closet unit between the front seat and  the bed. The length is 49" (bathroom 34" and closet 15") and the width 30-28 depending on the vertical position).  As my original idea was to utilize the van volume to maximum, I did not want to use the stud-plywood structure, but to use load bearing relatively thin panels. To build this room I needed three large panels: two for side walls and one for the wall between bath and closet.  I also needed three full height doors: two for the bath and one for the closet. The outside surfaces of the walls and doors that would be visible, I wanted to already have high quality finish to avoid all work related to finishing like sanding, polishing, lacking, painting.  This type of work is very meticulous  and time consuming if you want to achieve the real professional quality. 

The ceiling cabinets are not shown on the floor plan.  I wanted to have them for the full perimeter of the van under the ceiling except the entrance part of the sliding door between the kitchen cabinets and the passenger seat. Again, I wanted a simple construct  not based on the wood frame-plywood structure with plywood doors. Thus I needed some more finished panels for cabinets also. The construction of those cabinets will be described in the Woodwork Furniture II page.

Materials used

I knew that Ikea  "AS IS" section often sells such panels, so I started to visit Ikea searching for panels that would fit my goal. The biggest problem was to get the color and finish quality I wanted. After several visits, I finally found what was acceptable. I could not find all panels of the same color, but as I discovered later, having different colors made design more aesthetically pleasing.

Eventually, I bought in Ikea the following pieces:

• Three large panels 96"x36" (two - light beige and one - green-grey)
• Two smaller panels 90"x22" (very light green-grey)
• The wardrobe with three doors and a mirror (Brimnes, white)
• Small panel 18"x40" for the table (wood surface) 

The panels are high quality particle boards laminated with plastic on both sides: one side is highly glossy and another is matte. Normally they are quite expensive, however as I bought them in a "as is" section, I got them for more than 50% off  with minor blemishes.

The Brimnes wardrobe, which fit almost perfectly to the unit size, I bought mainly for the doors,  and also to use its other parts for various elements in furniture construction.


I also bought a DreamLine SlimLine 32"x32"  black acrylic shower pane with corner sink hole from Lowe's for $166.

Construction of the bathroom-closet unit

The outside walls of the bath-closet unit are made of two beige panels facing shiny side outside. I made a cardboard template fitting the curves of the van's side wall with window and cut the board, keeping the shiny side  on the clean side of the cut to avoid damaging the shiny plastic. The cut came out surprisingly clean and exact with average 1/8" gap between the board and the wall. I installed those walls by screwing them with pocket screws to the floor plywood, ceiling plywood and the the van ribs, as can be seen on images below, showing the inside surface of both walls. I also filled the space between the ceiling and the walls with sikaflex, providing additional rigidity both to walls and ceiling.

..

This is how the outside surface looks. The bluish color comes from the protective plastic screen covering the shiny side of boards. 

The middle wall is made of two side walls of the wardrobe screwed together with pocket screws and cut similarly to the outside walls to fit the van curves.

..

The board thickness is 5/8" and on 74" height they flex easily and require reinforcement.  It happened that the wardrobe doors total width of 46" was 3" shy of the full unit width, so i needed to have some kind of inserts. Thus I cut five narrow 3" strips from the wardrobe side and middle walls (front facing parts that had the pre-drilled holes for the door hinges), and screwed them to all three unit walls (two on each side of the bath and one on the closet). This gave me the required width for the doors, provided needed reinforcement rigidity, and I had the original holes for perfect door mounting. The walls with reinforcement strips are shown below.

  ..

 The final look of the constructed  closet is below.

..

The shower base fits tightly between the walls and is screwed to them and to the floor. Since the sink hole is not in the center, I had to select its position to accommodate for the cassette toilet door through the van wall, and for the van's bottom reinforcement ribs. I was actually lucky that one of the possible positions, fit all needs and the hole did not go through those ribs. The next images shows details of the final bathroom construction. On them you can also see:

• the pink base for the cassette toilet, 
• the small vanity top with the hole for the bathroom sink made of the same corian piece used for kitchen countertop 
• the bent plywood panel covering the insulation of the van's wall
• the plumbing details
• the bathroom light.

.....

.

..







The final look of the bathroom-closet unit with doors in place is here:

....