Yes, it's true, this ongoing, on again, off again project has been in its final stages for some time. With our post about the finished custom cabinets we essentially checked the last big box on our punch list before we could really consider this room done.

We've wanted to share the overall end result of this room so many times, but we never allowed ourselves to call it complete and write this blog post until we actually achieved the milestone. Considering our bathroom looked like this when the project started...

...I'm sure you can understand our excitement at the fact it looks like this today.

Can you believe that's the same space? I can't describe to you just how happy this before and after makes us.

The photos we took during our home inspection are some of the only photos we have of the bathroom in its original form.

The angles are bad, lighting is terrible, but it can give you a sense of what we had to work with.

It was a "fine" master bathroom for a while, but we always knew what we wanted it to be. But before we could get there, we had a long road ahead of us.

As we share more photos of our journey, let's take a little trip down memory lane to revisit where we were and how far we've come. Maybe I can even sing you a little tune, as I apparently like to do while working on joint compound and plaster.

When we purchased our home in 2003 the bathroom left something to be desired. It was an odd room that combined a pass through closet with an oversized jacuzzi tub shower...that had no shower curtain. We ultimately put up a makeshift curtain on a copper pipe for a little while.

The homemade plywood vanity with blue tile top was a breeding ground for bacteria and mildew where water would collect in crevices. There were two small and poorly functioning drawers with  open cabinets below where everything would end up piled on the bottom of the opening.

There were more issues than just the vanity. The walls and ceiling were cracked and crumbling in places, the room was always too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and the floor tile was so old and scratched it could never really get clean. There was even a weird ceiling drywall box concealing attic duct work above the toilet that always left us a little perplexed.

Needless to say, when it came time to tear this bathroom apart Wendy and I had no hesitation whatsoever, and she looked forward to its timely demise with tremendous enthusiasm.

Throughout the on again off again efforts in this room, we never stopped daydreaming of the bathroom we would ultimately build. We had a few simple goals in this room, all hopefully achievable. Like so many of our projects, our ultimate goal started life on a napkin sketch while out for drinks and dinner one night.

This bathroom was easily the biggest undertaking of our DIY lives, and we had a lot of wants we hoped we'd be able to fulfill. Looking back on those early days, it was daunting. But in our lives, *super* slow and steady ultimately wins the race. The key was sticking with it while trying to accomplish each of our project wants, along with all of the project needs.

We wanted to make it look beautiful, bright, and appropriate to the age of our home. This meant using marble hex on the floor and white subway tile on the wall of the shower, and white Victorian beadboard around the room.

Our sourcing process was extensive and we probably spent as much time looking for the right fixtures, materials, and approaches as we actually spent working on the project. We found our floor tiles from Amazon, our beadboard from our favorite mill in California, Mad River Woodworks, and subway tile from Renaissance Tile & Bath in Old Town. The list of places we ultimately ordered from is probably longer than my overly wordy blog posts!

We wanted to use the antique cast iron claw foot tub we'd found on eBay (for $150!!!) and picked up from another house in Alexandria in about 2004.

It sat in our basement for over 10 years, then we hired movers to lift all of its cast iron weightiness upstairs and into our bathroom. After a serious cleaning with some miracle stuff we had ourselves a beautiful antique clawfoot tub absolutely perfect for the room. Today it looks right at home like it's been there all its life.

We wanted to turn a vintage piece of furniture into our marble-topped double vanity. We ultimately found the perfect piece in an antique store in Alexandria's Del Ray neighborhood.

Then we slowly transformed it (and by that I mean we essentially rebuilt the internal structure to support a marble top) into what we had hoped it would be.

We wanted to solve the heating and cooling issues with radiant floor heat for the winter, and have better ducting for the summer.

We wanted to restore the original 1880's window, fixing the broken sash cords and making the upper sash functional again. We even found historically accurate red dot Samson sash cord to do the job!

We wanted to build custom cabinets completely from scratch to flank the vintage buffet turned vanity. This part of the project took so much longer than expected, but we're completely thrilled with the outcome!

The list of our wants in this project goes on and on and on, which speaks to the overall scale and number of steps in this project. As we carved out little slivers of time in our evenings and weekends we slowly saw our bathroom taking shape. We even had a little help from our friends.

From start to finish this project was massive, time consuming, challenging, fulfilling, tedious, enjoyable, and one that I'm so glad we took on. It tested our patience and let us build our skills and confidence in taking on larger projects in the future.

Every day when I wake up to take a shower, I look forward to the experience. The large and very luxurious frameless glass shower has a panoramic view of the bathroom (so we can look at everything that took us so very long to build), and a great view out of the window into the canopy of the tree off the side of our house.

We're both so very proud of the many small details we know most people will never really notice, but they combine to make a wonderful room.

One of our favorite features of the room ended up being one you can't even see. The radiant floor heat is so wonderful on those cool mornings that would otherwise be painfully frigid on your feet. In the middle of winter I've even found myself standing in the bathroom to warm up a little. Temperature-wise it's the most comfortable room in the house.

We feel that all of our efforts were very well worth the outcome. While Wendy certainly would have liked it to have been in a much shorter timeline, those years of a non-functional bathroom have begun to slowly fade away. 

I look forward to using the confidence, skills, and knowledge we've acquired while working on this room and applying it on other projects in the future.

And to those of you that have been patiently reading along since the early days of our blog six years ago, thank you for sticking with us while we slowly and methodically worked on this project. It's crazy to think about how long this has taken us start to finish, and it's even crazier to think about everything else we've worked on and finished in that time. I'm sure there are some people that thought we'd never be able to say "we're done" with our bathroom project. Honestly, I think one of those people is actually Wendy. But if there's one thing about us that's good to know, it may take us a while but we'll eventually get the job done. If you'd like to run through all of our posts about the Master Bathroom project, we've tagged them all and have them available on the Master Bathroom page.

What's the longest you've ever worked on a single project start to finish? And how would your spouse feel if you exceeded your original estimate on completion by about 1000%? After this I'm starting to think that chronic DIYers might want to add a new section to their wedding vows, "In sickness and in health, regardless of timeline, 'til death do us part."  

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Yes, it's true, and I can hardly believe we're reporting this major milestone to you! Our master bathroom in our Old Town row house has been an ongoing project since...well, the early days of our blog. And if you're counting, our blog just turned six years old a few weeks ago!! In Internet years, that's like 82 I think.

We may not have had any hoopla surrounding our blogging birthday, but there's really no better way to celebrate than with a completed project!

Since there's a pretty good chance you don't have any clue what I'm talking about when it comes to our cabinet project, let me quickly refresh your memory.

It all started with a drawing on a happy hour napkin that outlined Wendy's vision for our bathroom vanity wall. We completed the vanity several years back by converting an antique buffet into a marble topped double sink, but the two cabinets that were planned to flank the vanity were both just figments of our imagination.

After we finished up the first steps on the napkin vision, following a very very VERY lengthy process of more steps than I care to mention to get to the point where our bathroom had things like walls, a floor, flushing toilet, and other things you commonly associated with a modern bathroom, we had ourselves a very lonely looking vanity.

In anticipation of the cabinets project we picked up a cart full of pine lumber and supplies from Lowe's and figured we'd have it all finished up in a few weeks...womp womp.

The build started with gusto as we built the cabinet bottoms, but quickly crawled to a near halt as other projects took precedence. The problem we faced was the classic DIY conundrum. The bathroom was functional but cosmetically not complete, but the cosmetics could wait.

After a lengthy hiatus we picked the work back up and began construction of the upper sections of the cabinets.

This even included custom cabinet crown to mimic our bathroom's crown.

Even after getting this second wind, there they sat. Nearly complete but still far to go. These cabinets needed lower "doors" to front the pull out laundry baskets, and a whole lot of paint before they could be called done.

Well, our third wind blew into town and today I'm here to report that Phase One of "Make Matching Cabinets From this Napkin Sketch and Wood" has crossed the finish line. And even better, we love the results!

When it came to painting we first had to prep with a lot of sanding. I felt like I sanded everything smooth for days. After sanding everything to 180 grit we painted the uppers and lowers of the cabinets with one coat primer and two coats of paint.

To apply the paint we decided to go the brush painted route rather than spraying. We did this for a few reasons, but primarily because we want these cabinets to look like they've possibly always been a part of the house. Though spraying is fast and looks great, the smooth and brush mark free finish just looks a little too new for the look we're going for. I even built the uppers in a way that's typical for older furniture, using multiple pieces of wood for the backing rather than large sheets of plywood. If all turns out as we hope, this will look like furniture that's been moved from room to room until finally ending up in our bathroom.

While we were trying to make the exterior of the cabinets look polished with clean lines and no joints, but still handmade, we made the interior of the upper cabinets a little rougher. This is typical of older antiques where boards not typically visible on the backing aren't quite even or have small gaps. So we used this approach rather than plywood, which also allowed us to work around the wainscoting and rail moulding of the room in a more effective manner. This way, if someone in the future doesn't want these cabinets in the room, taking them out won't leave a large gap in the room's moulding.

Finally, after painting and reassembly in place, the two components of the build were screwed together, the lower and upper cabinets were secured to the wall to prevent the possibility of tipping.

We could practically see the finish line! At this point all that was left was to finish the lower laundry pull out drawers. This included adding a bunch of venting holes, sealing the interior of the wood boxes, and building the cabinet "doors" that will face these drawers.

The venting holes were the first step. I ended up using a 1" hole cutting saw drill bit and measured out consistent spacing on all four drawers. Ten holes on the back and five on each side. So 20 holes in each drawer and 80 holes total. It's our hope that these holes will allow the dirty clothes in these boxes to breathe and avoid getting stinky. We know we won't be throwing wet clothes or towels in there but the holes are another precaution.

With the holes all finished we sanded the boxes completely, inside and out, up to 180 grit paper. Then we used the same floor finishing sealer and finish we used on our floors in our Foursquare, Pal X325 and Pal X95. This floor finish is the final line of protection against clothing stink issue. It's washable and seals the wood, making it less likely to absorb the smells or water if anything wet sneaks in.

In the process of working on these cabinets, especially because it was taking so very long, we got the drawers painted and even started loading some stuff into the upper shelves. I know we'll eventually place more practical items on these shelves, like extra hand towels nicely folded, but for now a few sentimental items work nicely.

The final step of the project was to build and apply the drawer fronts that look like doors. To build this out I used a router bit set I had for rail and stile doors that matched very closely to the profile the antique buffet vanity has on its doors.

I had to modify the finished boards just a little by taking a small edge detail off with the table saw, which made the assembly a little more difficult. That's what those little shim pieces are in the photo. Those pieces fill in the gap left by cutting off the little bit of extra wood left by the router. Then I used MDF panels in the doors to protect against expansion or contraction of the panel since MDF is so stable.

We finished the door fronts, test fit them in the opening, and there the cabinets sat again..for several more months. Ugh, we were so close!!

Not only did we have other projects to handle, like the living room project at our foursquare, I had hit a mental block. Our other projects were keeping us busy and I wasn't sure how I wanted to attach the door fronts to the large drawers, so I became paralyzed by the decision. This happens to me so often on projects. I typically need a little inspiration from Wendy to jump start the work again, and in this case she was effective in her strategy. She asked for these cabinets to be complete as her birthday gift.

When I finally came around to the decision of how to attach them, it was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I was going to screw from the inside of the drawers into the back of the doors. But that had its own difficulties. It took a ton of measurements and patience because I couldn't mount them with the drawers closed.

After about an hour of work on each drawer, I finally had everything attached and ready to be sanded and painted.

Sanding was straight forward, but was critical to smooth the irregularities left between the joints. 

Again, sanded down to 180 grit and we had ourselves some drawers ready for a coat of primer and two coats of paint.

Finally, after nearly two years of on and off effort, we could look at the two large cabinets flanking our vanity and say "they're done!" Well, almost.

Eventually I want to build three pane glass doors for the uppers, but for now my attention needs to turn to more important projects.

We really tried to plan for everything with these cabinets, including making sure the drawers would nearly perfectly accommodate extra rolls of TP, hidden away but easily within reach.

The finished product, inspired by a restaurant napkin sketch many years before, looks just as we always wanted. It feels balanced and offers great extra storage in the bathroom. And best of all, we no longer have a laundry basket sitting behind the door of our bedroom. 

As far as the bathroom goes, we have a few very minor moulding details to finish up then we'll call this bathroom project complete for the time being. Of course, we still have other items we'll need to tackle in this room, and most projects are never truly complete, but for us, this long lasting project has almost everything in the "done" box checked.

Interested in how we got to where we are? Check out some of our other posts about the cabinet build.

• Building the Base on Custom Bathroom Cabinets
• Cheating My Way to an Integrated Cabinet Bead
• The Beginnings of a Custom Pre-Sorted Laundry Hamper
• Reviving Work on our Custom Master Bathroom Cabinets
• Custom Master Bathroom Cabinets Taking Shape

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Seems that we've been working on a lot but haven't been getting many of those items completed. Add a crazy work schedule, Halloween, now Thanksgiving, and an early October vacation into the mix and you've got yourself a recipe for blog slackerdom.

However, what we lack in blog posts I'm hoping we've made up for in progress that we'll be sharing over the coming weeks. Most notably we've been finally moving along the long delayed master bathroom cabinets project.

You remember those right? The two cabinets we've been building that will flank the master bathroom vanity?

We've been slowly making some really great project on these babies. This includes a good deal of working to build drawers to help close up four of the glaring holes on the front of the lower section and replacing it with functional storage.

The process is very repetitive but that makes it go more quickly. All four drawers are the same dimension so it was a matter of first cutting and sanding all of the pieces...

...and then assembling them all at once. I just used a little glue and a brad nailer to assemble the 1/2" plywood drawers.

The installation of the drawers on the slides was pretty straight forward. I installed the drawers without the drawer front using a jig clamped to the front of the cabinet. This allowed me to screw the drawers to the slides while it was all in place.

Once the drawers were all set I could then slide them back to a fully closed position, and then make sure the front of the drawer was perfectly position before screwing through from inside of the drawer into the back of the drawer front.

The end result is a pretty nice looking drawer front that will work perfectly with a polished nickel bin pull matching the vanity.

I'm more or less building each of these cabinets as two separate pieces. They both consist of an upper section and a lower section. This will make things easier when it comes to assembly, transportation, painting, and life in general. My foolish younger days would have seen me build it as one giant piece and get it stuck in the basement, but I know better than that now. As a result, I attached the bottom of the upper cabinets right to the upper structure using a bunch of countersunk wood screws.

Next up I constructed and attached the face frame of the upper section of the cabinets using copious amounts of wood glue, biscuits, and clamps.

It felt like such a minor addition to the project but went such a long way to make it feel more like a piece of furniture.

Finally, I applied the finish bead on the upper cabinets as I'd already done on the lower.

After building the cabinet shell they sat along side of our vanity looking like they might one day be decent, but there was clearly something lacking about their overall aesthetic. The most obvious thing missing (aside from things like lower doors, drawers, and paint) was a crown molding embellishment of some sort. Without the crown the two cabinets had a bit of a monolith look to them.

When planning the crown detail we wanted to do something that would fit with the room, but not something to large and top heavy. Primarily, whatever we chose had to look like it belongs in the space with everything else around it.

Due to this detail we took our inspiration from the crown moulding of the room. The crown we've used in each of the second floor rooms except for the hallway is a relatively simple large cove with a bead detail both above and below the primary cove. We both love this crown and feel it's simple enough without distracting from the room.

Based on this design we decided to make our own custom crown for the cabinets that borrowed from these elements. To test out our idea we held up a few scrap pieces of wood that is more or less the gist of what we were going for. Good news for us, we liked the look a lot.

To pull this look off we started with some 1/2" pine stock and used the router to cut an inset round over. Then I ripped these pieces to work as a backer and topper for a simple cove. To get a sense for the size of each piece and where we'd need to rip them we mocked up a small piece of the cove.

The cove I'm using is a plain 1-5/8" pine cove, and it uses the round over pieces as the back and upper boundary.

In order to install crown on a cabinet it's always easier to have a solid backer and upper section that becomes the boundary. Without the upper piece to rest the crown against, it's hard to get the miters to really line up since it's really just floating in space. To remedy this I decided to install the crown as three separate parts on the cabinets.

First I applied the backer piece along the top of the cabinet with a small reveal above the bead.

I then nailed the top piece down from the top, giving myself a good right angle like you'd have with a wall meeting a ceiling. This look alone actually looked very nice, and it seemed like it could stand on its own, but our goal of mimicking the crown was a simple cove step away.

A few quick cuts on the miter saw and a few brad nails later and we had ourselves the custom three part cabinet crown meant for these cabinets.

Looking up from the floor this looks exactly as we'd hoped. Not too top heavy, similar to the larger crown above in the room, and enough ornamentation to give the cabinets a look of furniture.

You can see just how significant this rather small detail is when comparing the complete vs. incomplete cabinets.

All told, this minor detail on the top of the cabinet is a simple embellishment that goes a long way to completing the overall look. It complements the crown moulding of the room and adds just enough decoration to truly set the cabinets apart. 

We still need to build the lower door fronts, prime and paint the whole thing, and ultimately build upper glass front doors and upper shelves, but this cabinet train is really moving along now. At this rate we might even have this project done before 2020! Alas, only time will tell.

What do you think of the cabinet crown, does it complete the look of the cabinets? We ca't wait to get this moving along a little further so we can check "build cabinets" off of the master bathroom list. We may be years into it, but we still want to eventually do a grand reveal of our completed bathroom projects. Oh this is the project that will never end, it just goes on and on my friend!

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And do you remember when we finished it? No? Yeah, neither do we, because it's still not finished, no matter how great we think it looks in some photos. We have blog posts on our master bathroom going back to March, 2012!!!

If you've been hanging around this blog for a while, this post topic may seem a bit familiar. About this time last year our bathroom was fully functional, but not 100% complete. We still had a few checklist items to take care of (like a closet door, a little trim, a window restoration), and one, well, make that two major pieces left. 

More specifically, we needed to build the two large storage cabinet bases that would ultimately live on either side of our converted antique vanity. Look at how alone it looked on that big wall with nothing accompanying it.

Last year I started this project with every intention of knocking it out in a few weeks. Initial work started fast and furious and before we knew it we had two nearly completed yet very unfinished cabinet bases. Though we started fast, before we knew it progress on these two cabinets stalled. It's such a total cop out to say it, but it feels like everything got in the way. Other projects, work, life, desire, general lethargy, and some amazing ability to see right past the fact that there were two partially finished cabinets flanking our vanity.

There they sat. Lonely, unfinished, motionless, partially built, screaming out for someone to come along and pick up where we'd left off and turn these shells into something worthwhile. There may have even been threats that they would be scrapped and something would be purchased rather than waiting for these cabinets to magically finish themselves. Instead, while we worked on other things all over the place, we neglected these little unfinished cabinets...until recently.

After nearly a year of a lack of construction activity, enough was enough. We picked up the work on the base by adding some baseboard. We had debated about whether we wanted the base of the cabinets to be open, like the vanity, or closed, more like the baseboards of the room. Since we're borrowing features from both the room and the vanity, and we don't want the cabinets to look just like the vanity, we decided to go with what was ultimately the more simple route and make them closed.

Before we build the doors and drawers for the cabinets I want to get the whole cabinet body finished. This means the next step in our cabinet build will be on the upper cabinet sections. So far we've been focusing on the closed lowers, but the plan for the upper cabinets is to build a shallower component that will sit atop the lowers, and will be fitted with adjustable shelves and two glass front doors. 

However, these upper cabinets will need to run past the beadboard cap (which we covered at legnth back in December, 2013) that protrudes rather significantly from the wall. We didn't want to interrupt the molding in the event someone wants to get rid of these cabinets in the future, so we have to build the cabinets to wrap around the molding. I started by duplicating the molding profile with my Contour Gauge Duplicator.

I then traced the contour onto the wood I'd cut for the cabinet sides. 

Using my jigsaw (though a coping saw would have worked fine but taken a little longer), I carefully cut out the profile of the molding so the upper cabinet can sit back agains the wall while and will fit around the molding.

A quick test fit of the first piece told me we were well on our way to upper cabinets.

I'm building these upper cabinets as a second piece to the overall cabinet. This will allow me to assemble everything in multiple pieces, and screw them all together at the time of final assembly. This also means that I can build each component in the basement without worry of how we'll get the giant thing up the stairs.

Though I STILL need to clean up our basement, I was able to make myself a small assemble space with some plywood and saw horses. All of the cuts are dado grooves or rabbet joints, so the whole thing more or less locks together. So I just need to glue the joints, fit everything in place, and then shoot in a few brad nails to hold it all in place while the glue sets.

All of the wood I'm using for this project is stock pine from Lowe's. I'm doing this, rather than using much plywood, to give these cabinets a bit of an older look to them. I want them to look like they've been in the bathroom for over 100 years. This is also a good excuse to make these cabinets look a little bit primitive in their construction. 

The face may look nice and proper with their little bead around the doors, but the interior back will have little gaps between boards and lines visible. It will look hand made, especially when painted, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

One annoying thing about how we're building these is that we have to keep taking them upstairs and down for test fits and assembly. While the individual cabinet pieces are not particularly heavy, they are awkward and require two people to drag them up and down the basement stairs. Here's my partner in crime helping me navigate our tricky stairwell.

Once we got the shell upstairs and into place it fit almost perfectly! (You can see just how excited Lulu is by this.)

I wrapped the interior of the upper cabinet around the molding, giving it a sort of ledge. This will let the interior back of the cabinet look normal rather than having the molding run through the inside of the cabinet. Also, you can see from the next photo what I was talking about with the minor inconsistency on the back panel. Once we have divided light doors with salvaged glass and it's all painted, it should look awesome.

Rather than assembling everything with a piece of plywood or mdf/masonite (think Ikea cabinets) nailed to the back, I fitted the backs with three full 3/4" thickness pine boards. This is a much more traditional approach to cabinet making and gives it a look of a much older piece. I'm still figuring out exactly how I want to handle the top piece. Right now it's just set in place as I think we may do interior lighting that will sit in a recessed area. We'll see exactly how that shakes out.

As I've cut and assembled I've always made up two of every piece for the twin cabinet on the other side. This has helped the assembly move along at a nice pace without the need to constantly recreate what I'd just done. I basically cut and build one cabinet while placing all of the pieces for the second in a pile. Then when the first cabinet's glue is drying, I assemble the other one. It's a good process and I can get in the rhythm.

Now that the two shells are done, the next steps for this project will involve the upper cabinet face frames and small crown detail we'll do at the very top of each cabinet. We'll be able to assemble everything with about a dozen screws that will be totally hidden from view, and we'll also secure the cabinets to studs in the wall to ensure they don't tip. Finally, we'll build the drawers, door fronts, and upper doors before painting everything.

I'm excited to be working on these cabinets again. The way the light bounces off of the cabinet sides and how these pieces fit in the room feel very natural and collected, which is exactly what we're going for. As much as I'm enjoying woodworking again, I do have to say that I'm frustrated beyond belief at the lack of space in the basement to do large furniture like this, and am often jealous of people with large garage wood shops. The whole time I'm working in the basement I'm also scheming about how we might be able to dig out a larger section to free up a little space for more wood working space. But maybe I could just finish a bunch of our half completed projects so I can just get more of the crap out of our basement? That's an idea.

What do you think of the progress so far?  

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Until now, we've kept all of our to be washed laundry in a large metal and fabric hamper that we bought back in 2000 shortly after we moved to DC. Since then we've thrown all of our dirty clothes into it in a heap. And since we renovated our bedroom and started our bathroom project, that hamper has been tucked behind the bedroom door, almost as if it was trying to hide away because it knows its days are numbered.

That old hamper has served us well, but we've wanted a better solution for quite some time. For our new hamper, our hopes are clear. 

1. We want our hamper solution to offer an integrated approach to our life, where the hamper essentially hides in plain sight. 
2. We also want to stop wasting time each week by sorting our laundry and piling it it the middle of the bedroom on the floor, instead having reserved areas for each type of laundry load so we can pre-sort our loads and just grab and go.
3. And finally, we want the hamper to tell us when we need to do a load of laundry by holding only enough clothing for a single load in our small washing machine.

As you may remember, we've been building two custom cabinets on either side of our master bathroom vanity. While these will look like somewhat traditional tall cabinets that offer a bunch of extra storage, our plan from the beginning was to use the lower cabinet area to serve as our laundry hampers.

I'm responsible for the laundry in our home, and I have four different types of loads when I do laundry. Whites, warm colors, cold colors, and delicate colds that hang dry. If you'll notice, the two cabinets we're building have four large lower cabinet openings that just happen to be the perfect number for our load types. 

We've debated how we want to handle this for some time, and for a while we thought we'd build the hamper containers as tilt out doors. But the more we thought about it, the more we felt we could do something that might work a little better. 

I picked up four sets of fully concealed undermount KV 12" drawer slides and started building our custom hamper drawers. I had to build up the mounting locations of the slides a little bit but I could see it coming together.

The most important part of this whole endeavor is the measuring and planning of the drawer/box size. The drawer slides come with detailed instructions that feel a little like trying to decipher a treasure map. There are measurements and tables all over the place, and if you study it long enough it will tell you the exact dimensions of the drawers you'll need based on the opening, and exactly how to trim and cut everything to make it function properly.

I decided to build the drawers out of simple 1/2" birch plywood. While the cabinets are all pine, the fully concealed hampers don't need anything more than simple. Once I had all of my measurements figured out based on the test mounted drawer slides, I decided to cut all of the pieces for the hampers at once to reduce the need to change saw blades several times.

It was a pretty straight forward process. First I set the saw and cut each of the pieces of 1/2" plywood to size. I stacked each of the 4 side pieces for each hamper together and kept them organized by unit. 

Next I cut the pieces of 1/4" plywood that will make up the bottoms of the hamper.

I had to cut the relief for the drawer bottoms since the 1/4" plywood was smaller than my dado blade can cut. 

After all of the pieces were cut to the correct dimensions, I switched over to my dado blade to cut rabbets on the edge of each piece to form the boxes.

Cutting all of the wood for the four hamper drawers probably only took about an hour total, which was way easier than cutting and building each drawer one at a time. I also decided to go ahead and sand all of the pieces with 120 and 180 grit paper to knock off any fuzz. We're not sure how we'll finish the interior or exterior, but whatever we do we'll need to sand, and it's much easier to sand before assembly.

Assembly was also a snap. I used glues on the joints and the brad nailer with 1-1/4" brads  to assemble three sides and bottom, then finished off the last piece with the same brads.

Before I knew it I had four matching boxes waiting for the undermount hardware. The rabbets on the edges made the assembly a snap and each box was nice and sturdy.

The most critical aspect of the undermount slide mounting involved cutting notches where the drawer slides extend beyond the back of the hamper boxes. This careful measurement is outlined in the slide's instructions and must be made exactly as outlined.

I really should have cut these notches before assembly, but I didn't think about it. Instead I ended up setting the dado blade to the right height and just ran the whole box upright over the blade to make the cuts. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out pretty well given that I did it all out of order. 

If you notice the little pencil mark above the notches, that's another important piece of the slide mount. The slides have a little hook that goes into this hole to hold the whole assembly in place. The hole needs to be in a specific place to make the slides mount properly. To make the whole I used the drill bit they specified and marked the max depth with a piece of painters tape. This ensures the hole is deep enough based on the instructions, but doesn't go through the back of the hamper drawer.

The interesting thing about undermount slides is the fact that very little hardware actually gets mounted to the drawer itself. The slides are all attached to the cabinet and the only thing that's mounted to the drawer are the clips at the front of each drawer that hold the whole thing in place.

The clips mount with just two screws in each clip into the front of the drawers. Gravity does most of the rest of the work once the drawers are in place.

Before mounting the slides in the cabinet, I placed one where it will sit on the bottom of the drawer to get an idea of how the slide really works. It's cool to me that the hardware is so complex and significant, but it's designed in a way that you really don't see it once it's installed. In this photo, the bottom is the front of the drawer, and the top is the back.

I built the hamper drawers with the idea that I'll attach finished drawer fronts to them later. So I had to account for this while mounting the slides. I mounted the slides about 3/4" back from the front location so I can attach the drawer front and have everything match up nice and evenly when I build the fronts.

As you can see above, I left the back of the cabinets open as there are outlets in the wall that I want to maintain access to. If we want to do some integrated LED lights in the upper cabinets, I'll be able to plug them in behind the lower drawers since there's a decent gap behind them.

After mounting the clips to the drawer, and screwing the slides to the interior of the cabinets, all that was left was to place the hamper drawers on the slides to test it out. But I ran into a problem. I followed the instructions exactly, but the drawers wouldn't quite clip in. In order to make it work I had to use a needly nose plier to make a slight adjustment to the drawer slides. I bent the hook on the back upright just a tiny bit to give me an extra 1/8" of play, which let me clip the drawers right into place. Sometimes you just need to get a little creative.

Once in place we were able to test out the drawer's action. It was smooth, crisp, and the soft close feature of the slides works perfectly. The full extension also means that the drawers will be more accessible and easier to pull the laundry from the bottom.

I even tested out capacity of one of the hamper drawers. As it turns out, each hamper drawer will fit almost exactly one full load of laundry for our compact washer. This is perfect. It means that when a drawer is full it's time to do a load. And now that it will be pre-sorted, I can easily pull the load I want to do without the need to pick through everything. I was a little worried the drawers would be too small, but they turned out to be the exact right size.

In the above photo I actually had the slides mounted too far back by one set of screw holes. After I took that photo I moved everything forward by one spot and it's all right where it needs to be. 

We still need to build the drawer fronts, as well as the smaller upper drawers and fronts, but we're well on our way to the dream of pre-sorting laundry. We'll probably put little labels on the interior of the drawer to remind us which drawer is which, but once we use it for a few weeks I'm pretty sure it will be an automatic when it comes time to put our clothes in the hidden hamper. It makes us giant nerds, but we really can't wait for that day.  

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