How To Make an ironing board cupboard

When I was young, my parents renovated a part of our house and had an ironing board cupboard installed in the wall. This was a cupboard recessed into the wall that housed an iron and an ironing board that would pivot from a the back of the cupboard from a vertical to a horizontal position. My mum was wrapped with this addition to the house as it meant she could quickly iron something without having to set everything up.

When my wife and I built our house I had wanted to install one too. But our tight budget did not allow us to spend the $450 or so that they cost. It really annoyed me that they were so expensive as there isn’t a lot to them – “I could make one myself” popped into my head every time I thought about it.

When one of our children pulled the iron off the board setup in the laundry and almost onto her head I decided it was time to see if I really could make one myself.

My mum’s version had a board that would simply pivot out on a hinge attached to the base of the board. This required about 1300mm clear space in front of the cupboard to allow room for the board to extend - then a bit more room if you wanted to be able to walk around it.

Our laundry does not have that much room so I needed a different design. Either a much smaller board, or one that could fold out sideways. A smaller board was not going to be practical, so I settled on a sideways, folding design.

Like most of my projects, I like to set myself some design constraints – a little challenge to make the project more interesting, and hopefully improve the quality of the result too. My constraint for this project was to make the cupboard as thin as possible – to be precise it wasn’t to protrude from the wall more than 20mm once installed. The wall is 90mm thick, so this was an overall width of 110mm. The iron is 90mm wide, so this was going to be a challenge.

Making the board hinge sideways was relatively easy. It just required a hinged frame to be made and attached to the ironing board. However, as the board is around 1400mm long, this would require a very long, skinny cupboard. I thought this would look stupid, so I decided the board itself needed to fold in the middle as well. This meant the cupboard only needed to be as wide as half the length of the board.

I took a standard ironing board removed the legs and cut it in half. I then welded a 20mm RHS frame for each half of the board and attached them snugly underneath each board. I then joined a piano hinge to each frame and riveted the 2 hinges together. This made a double hinged joint between the 2 frames, giving a full 180 degrees of travel and allowed the board to fold completely back on itself. 1 hinge would have only given about 120 degrees of travel.

Once the ironing board frame and hinging mechanisms were complete I built a timber cupboard for it all to sit in. This was a simple cupboard with a shelf for placing items like a lint brush, the water container for the iron, scissors, and the iron itself.

The iron after use is obviously quite hot. I was concerned that the iron might be hot enough to smoulder the pine sides or MDF doors of the cupboard, especially given there is only about 10mm clearance around the iron. So I attached ceramic tiles around the section of the shelf where the iron sits. Given the small clearance, I had to recess the tile inside the door. This means the iron is now completely surrounded by tiles when placed in the cupboard which are capable of safely absorbing its heat until it cools down.

My other concern was that you may forget to turn the iron off when placing it back in the cupboard. This would eventually cause a fire despite the tiles. So I purchased a plastic ‘jiffy’ box which was the exact width of the iron and placed a 10AMP, 240Volt lever switch in the top of the box. This box was then placed on the shelf where the iron sits and the switch was wired in series to a standard 3 pin socket to power the iron. Now when the iron is placed on the box, the switch is depressed and the power to the iron is cut. I also placed a light in the circuit that illuminated whenever this circuit was closed serving as a visual sign that the iron was on.

I was nervous about the insurance implications of hard wiring this home-made circuit to the house circuit. So I decided to place a 3 pin plug on the end of the circuit which would protrude through the wall and be plugged into a power point adjacent to the cupboard in the laundry wall. This means the entire ironing board circuit could be easily disconnected by simply unplugging it from the power point.

With the ironing board mechanism, cupboard and wiring complete, it was time to cut a hole in the laundry wall and install. I cut an appropriate sized hole in the plaster, remove 1 stud from the wall and inserted noggins in appropriate places. The cupboard was then simply slid into the hole and screwed to the noggins. Some timber ‘quad’ beading was placed around the edge of the cupboard and the whole thing was painted.

The whole system works really well. It has reduced the clutter in the laundry, made it easier to setup the iron and made it safer for the kids. The project probably cost around $70 including the board, but took about 8 days which was a lot longer than I expected. Most of this time was spent figuring out how to make it all work and fit within the constraints. I could probably now make another one in less than 2 days.