How to make a drywall cabinet with your own hands: step-by-step instructions

A modern house is unthinkable without comfortable and functional furniture. Her serial samples do not always completely satisfy the tastes of the owners and harmoniously fit into the interior. Custom-made wooden furniture is too expensive. But what if you try to do it yourself, for example, a wardrobe made of drywall? This material is available, easy to process and assemble. In addition, an interior item made on its own will reflect all the wishes of the owner and bring joy to creativity, not to mention serious cost savings. Let's find out how to make a drywall cabinet with your own hands.

Advantages and disadvantages of home-made furniture from GKL

Advantages of gypsum board furniture:

• Complete freedom in choosing the size and configuration of cabinets. This allows not only to place shelves, niches and other elements that are most convenient for the owners in a way, but also as organically as possible to fit furniture into the interior of the apartment, without taking away precious space.

• There is no simpler way to divide the room into certain zones, how to make plasterboard partition. But this partition can also carry a payload: in drywall furniture, unlike wooden furniture, in principle, there is no ordinary-looking back side. It can at least be finished for the interior of the room, and it is better to make a double-sided wardrobe or rack with the help of drywall.

• Home-made furniture from GKL, following the recommendations, turns out to be quite durable and reliable.

Some of its disadvantages limit the appearance of such furniture in apartments:

1. This is a stationary piece of furniture. It can be redone, but not moved.
2. Such furniture is not suitable for storing items that can damage drywall with its sharp edges. A home-made cabinet is ideal for storing clothes or personal hygiene items, but not tools.
3. It is undesirable to use elements such as hinged doors in the construction of drywall. This is not always convenient for the cabinet during its operation, but the profiles are not designed for such a load. So the option of a type of coupe made from drywall with your own hands is more preferable and common.

Surface preparation and marking

Before starting to make your own drywall cabinet, you should determine its dimensions and appearance, think over, determine the place where we will be installing it. Here you can not do without a drawing. It must be detailed enough to accurately calculate the amount of material needed for the cabinet.

The walls and floor at the location of the cabinet must be prepared in advance: remove the old coating, clean from dust, degrease if necessary. A durable finish without significant defects can be left without touching.

All lines of profile fastening are transferred from the drawing to the walls and floor. Not only the guide rails of the vertical racks of the cabinet, but also the places where shelves, niches and other elements of the furniture structure will be made. Marking is carried out using a level, a ruler and a square.

Before you make a built-in cabinet, you need to determine the material of the frame. Wooden beams will give the cabinet greater strength, it is more convenient to attach drywall to them. But the tree is less durable and more susceptible to environmental influences. Therefore, it is preferable to use a galvanized profile.

Frame assembly

Doing a wardrobe with your own hands, you can plan local lighting in it. In this case, all work on laying the wires is carried out simultaneously with its assembly, and it is better to pre-mark the location of the fixtures and communications.

Before attaching profiles, stick on sealing tape on their surface adjacent to the wall. It will significantly increase the sound insulation of the structure. The drywall itself also dampens sound waves, so that the cabinet will also serve as additional protection from noisy neighbors.

• The guide profiles are fixed on the walls, ceiling and floor with dowels-nails. The recommended distance between the uprights is 400 mm.
• Vertical profiles that create the outer plane of the cabinet are attached to the rails on the floor and ceiling by means of small metal screws - “bugs”.
• Horizontal jumpers are attached. The smaller the distance between them, the more stable and reliable the cabinet will turn out. Particular attention should be paid to those places where it is planned to place the shelves: here the design must be strengthened to withstand the severity of things placed inside the cabinet.

Masters recommend reinforcing shelf mounting with other materials, for example, using wood or metal in individual elements of the cabinet. The inclusion of such elements will also allow you to create an exclusive appearance of the created product, if you place them with a certain artistic taste.

• The back wall may well not be done if the surface of the wall has a decent appearance. In this case, most of the horizontal jumpers on it become unnecessary, only supports under the shelves are mounted.

The process of forming the frame is presented more clearly in the video.

Drywall Mount

GKL is being cut. It is better to use the actual dimensions taken from the installed cabinet frame, and not indicated in the drawing: slight shifts during the assembly process are more than possible.

You can cut drywall with a carpentry hacksaw, but in order to process sections less, it is better to use a paint knife. In this case, an incision is made on one side of the drywall sheet, cutting through the cardboard layer. Then the sheet breaks neatly along this line, cardboard is cut from the other side.

The individual cladding elements are attached to the frame using self-tapping screws, the heads of which need to be slightly recessed into drywall.

The corners of the cabinet are necessarily reinforced with perforated metal corners, fixed in the process gypsum plaster. It is carried out as standard: the seams are glued with a serpentine tape, the heads of the screws are smeared, after which the finish layer is applied.

Due to the impossibility of placing hinged doors, cabinet shelves can be left open or elements can be purchased for installing compartment doors. Their installation is uncomplicated, but it will help to acquire a cabinet design with a functionally finished look.

At the final stage, the cabinet surface is finished in accordance with the general interior of the room.

Video instruction