If you’re looking to build upper cabinets in your camper van or RV, you’ve come to the right post. In this article, we will teach how to construct and install strong plywood cabinets in a van.
We love our camper van cabinets not only because they look great, but because they provide ample storage for our needs, and they’ve held a lot of weight (think glass jars and camera equipment) without breaking.
So, in this post, you’ll learn exactly our build process and all the different tools and materials we’ve used to construct our cabinets.
So if you’re ready, let’s get to it!
Step 1:
Plan Van Cabinet Layout & Dimensions
Before constructing ANYTHING in a camper van, it’s critical to plan ahead so that you know the shape and dimensions of what you’ll be building. That’s why we recommend creating a digital floorplan of your camper interior, like what we created in the diagram below.
In the floor plan above, you can see that we planned to build 6 upper cabinets (shaded in green) on the driver’s side of the camper van.
Don’t have a floor plan yet? Our digital floor plan creator guide teaches you how to create your own layout WITHOUT using any fancy, paid software.
Step 2:
Constructing The Van Cabinet Frame
Once you know the dimensions of your cabinet, the first step is to build the frame.
Materials & Tools List
Below are all the materials and tools we used in this stage of the cabinet construction process.
Table 1.1 - Materials List For Frame Construction
Product | Purpose | Where To Buy |
Baltic Birch Plywood | Great quality plywood for cabinet construction. | Local Lumber Yard |
6x1 Wood Screws | Hold plywood boards together | |
Wood Glue | You'll need lots of this! | |
Helpful Tools | ||
Power Drill | Drill screws and concealed hinge holes. | |
Table/Circular/Jig Saw | Cut plywood down to size. | |
Long Clamps | Clamps plywood pieces together while wood glue dries. | |
Construction Directions
We built our upper cabinets using 1/2″ Baltic Birch plywood and used a table saw to cut the large plywood boards down to the sizes we needed.
If we’re being honest, the process of building the cabinet frame is difficult to describe in a written blog, so we will let Adam describe this process in this incredibly informational video.
We believe Vanessa and Adam are really underrated when it comes to producing campervan build videos. Check them out!
How To Create Strong Plywood Joints
Because our van’s upper cabinets would have to withstand relentless vibration and jolts while we drive, we needed the plywood joints to be strong and resilient to movement. Just relying on wood screws to keep the wood joints together would not be enough.
Therefore, we used a combination of brass wood screws and wood glue for every plywood joint. We found that these particular 6×1 wood screws work very well when screwing together ½” plywood boards.
When joining two plywood boards together, we placed a bead of wood glue on one of the boards and screwed the two boards together with wood screws spaced 2″ apart. It’s a lot of screws, but we want the cabinets to be able to hold the weight, especially while driving on bumpy roads.
DIY Pro Tip: It’s important to invest in several 36″ clamps to allow the wood glue to cure the plywood boards in the proper position.
Step 3:
Cutting Holes For LED Lights
If you can plan for it now, installing LED lights to the underside of your cabinets is a great idea. These lights really allow you to focus the light onto a specific part of the van, such as directly over your kitchen.
We discuss how to do this here.
Materials & Tools List
Below is what you’ll need to install LED lights on the bottom of your cabinets.
Table 2.1 - Materials List For LED Light Installation
Product | Purpose | Where To Buy |
LED Puck Lights | Fantastic 12v, low profile lights. | |
Helpful Tools | ||
Power Drill | Used in conjunction with hole saw. | |
2-3/8" Hole Saw | Drills correct size hole | |
Build Instructions
To make room for these puck lights, we drilled a 2-3/8” hole on the underside of the cabinet frame for every puck light we installed. We did this by using our power drill and a correct size hole saw.
Once the cabinets are mounted to the camper van walls, you can insert the puck lights and completing the wiring.
To learn more, check out our 12v instillation post and our wiring LED lights post.
Table 2.1 - Materials List For LED Light Installation
Step 4:
Build & Attach Cabinet Fronts
With the cabinet frame finished, you can now work on creating the fronts (doors) for your cabinets.
Materials & Tools List
Below are all the materials and tools we used to attach our cabinet fronts to the frame.
Table 3.1 - Materials List For Fronts Installation
Product | Purpose | Where To Buy |
Baltic Birch Plywood | Great quality plywood for cabinet construction. | Local Lumber Yard |
Blum Hinges | High-quality, soft-close cabinet hinges. | |
Cabinet Door Handles | Beautiful brushed bronze cabinet handles. | |
Gas Struts | Keeps cabinet doors in open position. | |
Door Magnets | Keeps doors closed, especially while driving | |
Helpful Tools | ||
Concealed Hinge Jig | Helps you drill appropriate holes to fit concealed hinges. | |
Cabinet Handle Jig | Allows you to install perfectly located cabinet handles every time. | |
Cutting The Plywood
Making our cabinet door fronts was a simple job since we were cutting simple rectangles.
We simply measured each open space on our cabinet frame and used our table saw to cut the appropriate size cabinet fronts.
We use these wonderful soft-close concealed hinges, but to use these hinges you’ll need to use ¾” plywood. This is because you’ll need to bore out a ~0.5” deep hole on the backside of the cabinet front.
Good To Know: If you want to use other hinges, like these, you can still use standard ½” plywood.
Attaching Cabinet Fronts To Frame
Once you’ve got your plywood fronts cut to size, it’s time to attach them to the cabinet frame. We did this process in 4 steps, using 4 different products.
Attaching The Hinges
To install a Blum soft-close concealed hinge means having to bore out a sizeable hole on the backside of the cabinet front to fit the hinge inside. To do this you’ll need the Kreg Tool Concealed Hinge Jig.
This jig makes it incredibly easy to drill out the appropriate sized hole.
With a good set of clamps and a drill, boring out the concealed hinge holes was easy.
All that was left to do was to insert the concealed hinges into the holes and affix them with screws.
Attaching The Cabinet Handles
We purchased these beautiful brushed copper door handles and it was time to install them.
Instead of trying to estimate where to drill the holes for our handles, we purchased the Kreg Tool Cabinet Hardware Jig to take the guesswork out of the process. Using the jig ensured that our drill holes would be perfectly level and perfectly spaced apart for our handles.
Attaching The Gas Struts
With the hinges installed and the handles installed, the last piece of hardware to go in are our Gas Struts. These struts would help to hold our fronts open while we take things out and put things into our upper cabinets.
Once the gas struts were in, our upper cabinets were finished.
We were really excited to get to this point and could finally begin to see the light at the end of the conversion tunnel!
Installing The Magnetic Door Catches
With the cabinet doors attached to the frame, we could install our Magnetic Catches. This would help to prevent our upper cabinet doors from swinging open while we were driving.
Installing the Magnetic Catches was simple enough. Simply screw down the main piece in the center of the cabinet frame and screw in the metal piece onto the door.
Simple and straight forward. And for our upper cabinets, these magnetic catches work great!
Step 5:
Sanding & Painting Van Cabinets
Materials & Tools List
Below are all the materials and tools we used to sand and paint our cabinets.
Table 4.1 - Materials List For Fronts Installation
Product | Purpose | Where To Buy |
80-Grit Sand Paper | 1st stage sanding | |
120-Grit Sand Paper | 2nd stage (smoother) sanding | |
Anti-Mold Spray | Kills & deters mold growth | |
Anti-Mold Primer | Kills & deters mold growth | |
Paint | It's paint... | Hardware Store |
Helpful Tools | ||
Electric Sander | Makes sanding easier and quicker | |
Filtered Face Mask | Filters out wood particles and paint fumes. | |
Paint Brushes | To paint with... | Hardware Store |
Sanding The Cabinets
Similar to when we constructed our campervan walls, we sanded our cabinet frame and doors with our sander using both 80 & 120-grit sandpaper until the wood was smooth.
DIY Tip: We recommend wearing a filtered mask while sanding and painting. Keep those particles and noxious gasses out of your lungs.
Painting The Cabinets
After sanding, we applied two coats of Anti-Mold Primer and two coats of the same “Twinkling Lights” white paints that we used on our walls.
Step 6:
Mounting Cabinets To Van Walls
When the paint dried, it was time to mount the upper cabinet frame to the walls of our campervan.
Materials & Tools List
Below are the tools and resources we used to attach our cabinets to our van walls.
Table 5.1 - Materials List For Attaching Cabinets To Walls
Product | Purpose | Where To Find |
GSK Cabinet Screws | Designed to attach cabinets to walls | |
Furring Strips | Provides strong anchor point for cabinets to hold on to. | |
Friends (preferably two) | Help you to hoist your cabinets. |
Installation Instructions
Simply screwing these cabinets to thin plywood walls isn’t enough. Very likely these cabinets will rip away from the walls.
Therefore, in an earlier part of our van build, we installed furring strips to our van’s metal walls. These furring strips will help to securely hold our walls, cabinets, and all other furniture we will be putting into the van.
Attaching upper cabinets is a 3-person job; one person to hold each end of the cabinet in the proper place and the third person to put in the fasteners.
For this job, we used GRK Cabinet Screws. These screws work perfectly for the job because of the larger screw head area and they are self-tapping screws, meaning no pre-driling is required.
I’m not sure what carrying weight these cabinet screws are rated for, but I went ahead and over-estimated the amount of cabinet screws I would need.
Go Back: DIY Campervan Build Guide
Finished Van Cabinets Result
When all is finished, you should have beautiful upper cabinets installed in your van.
Camper Van Upper Cabinets Video
See our upper cabinets in action.
Watch our campervan tour video below. The video automatically skips right to when we start talking about our cabinets.
In this video you can see all the small intricacies of our upper cabinets; like our hinges, magnetic catches, handles, and gas struts.
We hope you enjoy!
Campervan Upper Cabinets - Conclusion
Thanks for reading our overview on how we installed strong and beautiful upper cabinets in our campervan.
If you have any questions regarding the construction process, please leave a comment below.
To read more specific campervan build articles like this, head over to our DIY Campervan Build Guide Homepage.
