How to Make a Joined Twin Dresser (With Two Secret Compartments)

For years now dad has been itching to make mom and himself a new set of dressers. And until recently, he just hasn't had the time to do so. But after some thoughtful planning, he decided that instead of making two separate dressers for the both of them, he'd make one large dresser to save on space and time.

Step 1: Building the Framework

Like almost any other woodworking project, you start by building your framework first so that the dimensions of your drawers and other aesthetics are set in stone. Most of our joists were cut to a thickness of 1" and were then screwed and glued together in the outlines of our drawers.

Depending on your preferences, you might want to consider using a pocket hole tool so that you can accurately connect your framing joists together without any problems.

Step 2: Drawer Construction

If any of you have ever built something with drawers before than you know how tedious it can be. This dresser had a total of 12 drawers and as you can imagine, took us a very long time to make. Our procedure was very simple however as we merely ripped all of our paneling pieces out on the table saw, put dadoes in the sides, and then glued and nailed everything together.

To make sure that plywood wasn't the faces of the drawers. We cut some of our pine boards to sizes that were slightly larger than their drawer face counterparts and then nailed them to the front of each drawer.

On mom and dad's old dresser, there were no drawer slides to be found making it very difficult at times to access the contents of the drawers. So to make things easier, we installed aluminum ball-bearing glides on each drawer so that they would smoothly slide in and out of their cavities.

Step 3: Handle Creation

Seeing as we're a bunch of cheapskates, we fashioned some handles for our drawers by cutting some of our pine boards into chunks, cutting out the designs on our bandsaw, and then shaping them on our oscillating sander.

Step 4: Hidden Compartments

Now, these compartments were nothing special compared to some of our other projects. But sometimes, when you're trying to make something hidden, you also want it to be easily accessed. So for this dresser, we split a board that we had glued together previously in half and then attached them to the back of the dresser with some hinges that can only be seen from the back. The only thing that is visible from the top is a seam that runs right down the middle of the dresser. So if you're not looking for it, you'd probably never notice it.