Build a Dresser: Cedar Dresser Drawer Liners

When you are building a project that is gonna hold clothes, or any kind of a garment, like the dresser I'm working on here, we're lookin' at the back, the drawers go that way, it's really nice if you can incorporate cedar into the project. It does a couple of things, it makes it nice and aromatic, makes your clothes smell good, also it does keep bugs away. So one of the things I wanted to do with this dresser was get a full cedar back, on the back of the dresser. The approach I took for that made life really easy for me, and easy's good. This stuff is available at home centers, and it's a particle board, you can see that it has got huge flakes in it.

These flakes are all of cedar. It's designed to be a closet liner, so it comes in quarter inch, by four by eight foot sheets. What I was able to do then was cut it up, get the right size, so it fits the back of my dresser here. Once I have the dresser completely finished I'll staple that in place. What's nice about this, it's got a great smell, it's easy to work with, much easier to install than the traditional tongue and groove cedar, which you can also buy.

In this case, because the back of this cabinet is blind, in other words, unless you take a drawer out, you're never gonna see this stuff. Kind of a waste of money for me to put solid cedar all the way in to the back of this cabin, and the cedar plate board made a lot more sense. One of the things you have to be aware of with it is that it is in the particle board family, it is thin, so it a little bit flimsy. For a dresser this size, which is about 30 by 52, once it's stapled in place, it's gonna be just fine. Bigger piece than that, you might wanna add some additional support to help the piece from flexing, so that it doesn't snap on you.

When you're handling it, in and out the shop, and onto the table saw, good idea to get an extra pair of hands so it doesn't snap at that point. With that kind of flimsiness in mind, and I don't mean that in a horrible way, you just gotta be aware of it, as far as drawer bottoms go, on this dresser I will use the cedar board in the bottom of the top two drawers, 'cause they're nice and skinny. And they're probably gonna hold unmentionables, and socks, little stuff. The drawers down below, which are a little bit deeper, and are then likely to hold more, bigger stuff, in other words, heavier items, I'm gonna go with a different drawer bottom material for those, 'cause I don't want to take a chance that a heavier item fractures the cedar over time. If you find that it kinds starts to lose its odorificness, what you can do is just run a finish sander over the top, that'll knock the oxidation of the surface and the smell will come right back.

So next time you are in a home center, ask around, see if they have this product, and if they do you can incorporate it into your project, and you are gonna come out smelling like roses, or in this case, cedar.