DIY Old Ugly Sliding Closet Door Makeover with Wood

Week 5 of the One Room Challenge is here and once again, we took a little bit of a detour. After three trips to IKEA, we still do not have all the components for Barry’s small closet, but we did tackle a closet door makeover on the old sliding closet doors. This was a super affordable makeover and I am in love with how they turned out! Despite the fact Barry still has no functioning closet and another trip to IKEA is in our future, I am calling this week a win! If you missed  week one, week two, week three, or week four of this guest room makeover, check those out first. By some miracle, I started this week off with literally no plan and still managed to whip out this makeover for our old, ugly closet doors. Are you ready to see it? 

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• Cost: Under $50

 

To refresh your memory, this is what we started with. The closet doors are hollow core doors and I was never a huge fan of them. They used to be brown but several years back I gave them some new life with a fresh coat of black paint. Better, but still just a basic closet door.   

Honestly, this makeover was not the first thing on my to do list at all. We originally thought we would be making custom bi-fold doors for the closet, because shocker, the closet door opening is a non-standard size. But when the closet configuration changed, we realized we could simply re-use the existing doors we had and spruce them up with an interesting visual element instead of buying entirely new doors. Let me walk you through how we did it, because I know you are going to want to try this diy project on your own closet doors! 

Sliding Closet Door Makeover Supplies

• Thin Plywood
• Circular Saw
• Speed Square
• Clamps
• Wood Glue
• Nail Gun
• Weights

Step 1: Pick Up Some Thin Plywood

For the first step of this easy weekend project, these sliding doors have a small gap between them so the material needs to be very thin. And don’t worry if you don’t have a truck, you can just strap it to the roof of your car. Yes, we actually did that and let me tell you, we picked the windiest day to do this! I swear I almost had a heart attack on the ride back from the home improvement store. 

Step 2: Cut the Plywood

I knew I wanted a chevron pattern when both slab doors were next to each other. So we started by cutting the plywood down to the size of each entire door. Because this plywood is so thin, it is also a bit challenging to cut. So we cut both pieces at the same time by clamping them them together on top of one another. We used our circular saw for this because our table saw setup isn’t big enough. Naturally, we used our go to folding table workstations and workout weights…..at least they are getting used for something, haha!  

Step 3: Cut It Again Into Strips

Like I said, I knew I wanted a chevron pattern and the best way to achieve that was to cut strips at an angle about the size of wood planks. I am not going to lie, the setup we used to cut these wood strips is a little janky, but it totally worked. We clamped a long piece of wood left over from the bunk beds to one table and used it as a straight edge guide. This is a little hard to illustrate with just a picture, but you can see the video in my Instagram stories closet door highlight. 

We used a 45 degree angle that we started with the speed square and continued on to cut 5 inch pieces. Once the first angle is cut, all you have to do is line it up with the guide and cut. I should also mention, we again cut both sheets of plywood simultaneously, with on piece face up, and one face down (this type of plywood has a front and a back). By laying one face up and one face down and cutting them at once, the pieces would line up to make my chevron pattern.  

As we cut the strips, I numbered the back of each piece and laid it out on a single door to make sure this was going to work out how I hoped.

After all the pieces were cut, I stacked them up with the last pieces on bottom, this way I could pull two at a time and they were in the correct order for assembly.   

Step 4: Attach the Strips to the Sliding Closet Doors

Initially I thought I could just glue these with wood glue, but that didn’t seem like enough. So I also used the nail gun on each corner of each strip. Since these doors are hollow core doors like the pizza table door, I could only nail on the edges of the door. And once again, I used ALL of our workout weights which I am thinking should just be called DIY weights at this point, haha! I spaced the strips on the closet doors with the edge of a ruler.  

I applied a liberal amount of wood glue to each strip and spread it with a dollar store paint brush to cover the whole piece. In total, I used two bottles of wood glue. You can watch this whole process in my Instagram Stories. 

While you could do this with gorilla construction adhesive, I wanted a glue that gave me a little bit more time to position each piece to my liking. I think the downfall to that is I needed the weights to hold everything down while the glue set. Just make sure you don’t have any glue leaks before you let them set.  

Step 5: Let the Glue Dry

Next step was to glue all the pieces to the closet doors. I did this over two days working from the top of the doors to the bottom. But you could also do one door at a time. I just didn’t have enough weights to do a second door at the same time. The bottom of the door was glued last and set for almost 24 hours before we installed them. 

Step 6: Install and Enjoy

The last step was to put up a new door track because the old one was fairly beat up. The track set came with new rollers, so we swapped those out as well. I think the new rollers also provide a little extra room to allow the doors to slide a little better. I grabbed these at Home Depot. 

Full disclosure, I still have to fill in all the nail holes and I am debating a paint color for the doors. It was my original plan to paint them but I really kind of like the wood color…..to be continued.  

I also need to decide on a door handle. I am considering black handles or leather pulls, but that’s a problem for next week 🙂 

This sliding closet door makeover was less than $50 and it was not a small project! It’s honestly one of the best DIY ideas I have tried with such a big payoff, now I am just disappointed I didn’t do this sooner! Since we have another bedroom makeover to come with the same closet doors, I would wager this project will be duplicated 😉 Spoiler alert, I used faux panels to make shiplap doors in the guest room! 

And here’s a before and after of the closet doors makeover. 

And this is what the DIY closet doors look like swapped.  

Next week I will only be sharing updates on Instagram so I can knock out a bunch of DIY projects and finishing work I still have to do. So pop by and say hi and check out all the behind the scenes. I will be back for week seven and of course the final reveal on November 18th 🙂  

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Don’t forget to stop by the One Room Challenge to check out all the featured designers and other guest participants and give them some encouragement. I am sure they are feeling just as stressed as I am right now!

This post, DIY Old Ugly Sliding Closet Door Makeover with Wood appeared first on Garrison Street Design Studio.