DIY Wooden Garage Cabinets

Ultimate Garage Cabinets: Tools, Materials & Cost

You could build this wood garage cabinets system with just a few hand tools, a drill and a circular saw, but a table saw would save you lots of time. The skills you’ll need are as basic as the tools. If you can make long straight cuts and screw parts together, you can build this wall mounted garage cabinets system.

This whole wood garage cabinets system is made from just two materials: plastic-coated particleboard usually called ‘melamine,’ and construction-grade pine 1x4s. (Melamine is the type of plastic used as the coating.) You could use ¾-in. plywood or particleboard, but I chose melamine because it didn’t require a finish.

The materials for this floor-to-ceiling wall mounted garage cabinets system cost about $37 per linear foot of wall space. That’s less than I would have paid for wimpy ‘utility’ cabinets at a home center. Our garage walls were 10 ft. tall. If your ceiling is about 8 ft. tall, you can eliminate the deep upper cabinets. That will lower the cost to about $27 per linear foot. If you opt for completely open shelving and skip the cabinet doors, your cost will drop to about $20 per linear foot.

Organizing a garage isn’t a one-size-fits-all project, so we’ve compiled some of our best garage storage ideas.

Plan the Ultimate Garage Cabinets System to Suit Your Stuff

Roughly block out the cabinet locations on the wall, using masking tape. Remember to space the garage cabinets to leave room for shelves in between. Experiment with different cabinet widths and spacing until you find a layout that works well. Follow these guidelines:

• Each cabinet must have at least one stud behind it so you can fasten the cabinet securely to the wall.
• Limit door widths to 24 in. or less. To cover a wider opening, install double doors. We limited most of our doors to 12-in. widths so that we could open them even when the car was parked in the garage.
• Shelves longer than 2 ft. often sag. If you make yours longer, stiffen the melamine by screwing 1×4 cleats to the undersides.
• Size your cabinets to make the most of a full sheet of melamine. By making our cabinets 16 in. deep, for example, we were able to cut three cabinet sides from each sheet with no wasted material (see Figure A for other dimensions). Don’t forget that your saw blade eats up about 1/8 in. of material with each cut. Some sheets of melamine are oversized by about 1 in. to account for this.

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