Dressing room beautifully fitted with PAX wardrobe

This is my latest PAX wardrobe build — five 2.36m x 1m x 0.58m wardrobes in a 3.05 x 2.7m dressing room.

Some shots of the space before the build.

And here’s what our dressing room looks like after the wardrobe build.

Three cabinets on one side and two on the other.

For what it is worth, 1m was planned for me… and 4m for the Mrs!

The Plan

The dressing room was pretty much built around the PAX wardrobe as part of our extension.

It connects from our bedroom on one side to the ensuite on another. The length of the room is 3050mm.

I designed the length of the room to allow a 25mm spacer at each end of the wardrobe, allowing the doors to open correctly against the walls.

The biggest complication is the roof. It slopes at one end, down to around 1800mm from a maximum of 2550mm. This means that although three of the frames can be the full 2.36m height, two of them have to be formed on an angle.

I cut one side panel down to the required height to form the angle. Also, cut the backpanel down to match, then built these frames as a lopsided frame.

The advantage of this is that the tall side still had positions to attach the door hinges. And the top panel now forms a useful shelf at 1.8m.

Something to note is that this frame is a bit flimsier as the top panel is not inline with the other panels. As such it is not held firmly against the other wardrobes.

To work around this I put a top shelf in each wardrobe frame to brace things up and give something for this wardrobe to push against.

Once I built the frames I filled the gaps at the ends and the top with painted MDF panels.

The exposed end panel of the short side of the wardrobe was also covered with a sheet of painted MDF. I screwed everything together and to the wall for rigidity.

Cutting the doors

We used ten FARDAL doors which we have added UTRUSTA push openers to give a handleless look.

There are mixed things said about using push openers on soft close doors. Apparently, you can damage one or other part over time but I have not had issues before.

I cut the FARDAL doors with a circular saw to get the angle for the sloping ceiling. And left a non-opening corner piece at the top of each end door so that the door could open underneath the sloped ceiling.

I used a few offcuts to make a framework. Then, attached a section of one of the door offcuts to make the filler panel.

With the end door now being shorter, to make it swing properly I used a Forstner bit to drill a 35mm hole to allow the 4th hinge to be mounted in a new position.

Wardrobe interior

Interior wise, it’s a mix of KOMPLEMENT shelves, drawers, baskets and rails. The only thing of note is that I have modified the drawers to fit alongside the hinges in the ‘forbidden zones’.

Others have done this using a router. I’ve gone for an alternative approach using plunge cuts with a circular saw as I don’t have a router.

This is something more people can do as most DIY’ers don’t have a router but may have a circular saw.

Practice on a scrap piece of wood. And set yourself up with a straight piece of wood as a cutting guide.

Soft close hinges in new positions

One thing to note is that the soft close hinges are too large to allow drawers to be fitted next to them. See the pic of the difference between the two hinges. I had to swap the hinges round so that the soft close hinge was the second hinge up and a normal hinge was at the bottom. This greatly reduced the amount of material to be cut from the side panel of the drawers.

One negative change I’ve noticed in the KOMPLEMENT drawers in recent years is the addition of the plastic runner cover strip. (Pic below) Why do you need a piece of plastic to cover the runner? A waste of plastic.