Wardrobe Refresh Part 1: Making It Functional

This post is brought to you by Rockler. As always, all opinions are 100% my own!

A while back JM and I rescued an old, beaten up wardrobe from an alley and brought it home with us. JM never really liked the dresser he was using for his clothes, so he was excited about the wardrobe, but it was in really bad shape and only about half of it was even usable. I mentioned the wardrobe to some people from Rockler Woodworking And Hardware and they offered to send me some tools and materials so I could fix it up and make it usable again! The wardrobe is still kinda ugly looking; it definitely needs some beautifying, but as my dad always reminds me, form follows function. So part 1 of this project was to take the beaten up wardrobe and make it usable again, and part 2 will be to pretty it up!

This is what the wardrobe looked like when we picked it up. The door was totally busted off of its hinges, there were scratches all over the thing, and pieces of the veneer had been ripped off. Plus one of the drawers basically fell out of the wardrobe when pulled open; it was totally unusable!

But my dad and I were able to fix it up so that it is a completely functional wardrobe now! Here’s what we used:

• shelf pin jig
• shelf pins
• new hinges
• new handles
• a few scraps of wood
• electric drill
• toothpicks
• superglue
• screwdriver

Rocker sent me their shelf pin jig, these shelf pins, these hinges, and these handles, and besides a few other tools, that’s all we needed to get the wardrobe functional again!

We started by fixing up the door. When the door was busted off its hinges, it also split the wood.

The first thing we did was remove the old hinges from the door and glue up the split wood. We put wood glue down into the split and then clamped it, using a few scraps of wood to protect the door from the clamps.

We set the door aside to let the glue dry and began working on the section behind the door. Originally it had a bar across the top so that you could hang clothes inside of it, but we have two giant closets in our room, so JM didn’t need additional clothes hanging space. So we decided to turn that section into shelves using a shelf pin jig! It’s really easy to use, just attach the included drill bit into your drill, line up the jig against one edge of wherever you want your shelf pins to go, and start drilling! Dad drilled about thirty holes into the front and back of each side of the wardrobe space in under five minutes!

While Dad worked on that part, I fixed up the holes from the old hinges using superglue and toothpicks. If you ever have a screw that has stripped a hole, or you want to reuse an old screw hole with a different size screw, you can just fill the old hole with a few pieces of a toothpick and some glue, and it’s good as new!

Just put some glue on one end of a toothpick, and stick it in the hole. Break the toothpick off flush with the top of the hole, and repeat until you can’t fit any more pieces of toothpick into the hole. Once the glue dries you can drive another screw into the hole, or near the hole, and the toothpicks will give the screw something to grab onto!

I filled all of the holes from the old hinges on both the door and the wardrobe this way. Then we added the new hinges to the freshly glued door, and reinstalled the door back into the wardrobe.

Once the shelf pin holes were drilled, Dad cut an old piece of wood into shelves, and we put them in the wardrobe along with some shelf pins to hold them in place. Then we replaced the old beat up handles, fixed the latch on the door, and Dad added a small scrap of wood as a stop at the top of the door to prevent it from pushing in too far past the latch and busting off the hinges again.

To fix the drawer, Dad added a few scraps of wood inside the wardrobe, just above where the drawer slid in and out. The drawer was falling out because once it was opened past a certain point, there was nothing inside the wardrobe holding it in anymore! So Dad added some scrap wood to help support the weight of the drawer.

Now when the back of the drawer tips slightly, it hits the block of wood above it instead of falling out.

Once the drawer was fixed, the wardrobe was fully functional again! It still isn’t very pretty, but that’s a project for another day!

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Disclosure: I received materials and tools from Rockler to help me fix up this wardrobe. But I love the hardware they sent me, and their shelf pin jig tool is really amazing, and all opinions in this post are 100% my own. I would never write a post about something I didn’t think was useful or interesting for you guys, and Practically Functional will only publish sponsored posts for companies or products I love and believe in! 🙂