Fast and Easy Way To Add Shelves to a Roadtrek Wardrobe Cabinet

In our 2011 190 Popular Roadtrek we have a wardrobe cabinet behind the driver's seat. It is set up with an RV "rod" to hang hangers from. Not many articles of clothing will fit in this cabinet if one tries
to hang them on hangers. It is possible to carry a more than a week's clothing in this cabinet by adding shelves.
 

The fastest way to install shelves is to purchase a soft-sided hanging shelf or "cube" unit from a closet or home store. These are found in almost every discount store, department store, linens store, etc. We looked at several before we found one that was going to fit just right inside the Roadtrek cabinet.

One thing to be aware of is that any of these that you buy will be too long for this short cabinet, but that is not a problem. Once inside the excess shelves will fold flat at the bottom. The one we selected, shown in the photo above, fits the width of the cabinet. As you look at the photo, you are seeing the rear dining table leg through the translucent vinyl back of the unit. We don't use the rear dining table, but if you did, it is no problem to get it out past the soft shelves. The unit did not come with the boards that you see on our shelves. I added these. Without the boards the shelves do sag down under the weight of the clothes and will limit the space that you can stack in on the shelf below. All I did was measure the soft bottom of each shelf, and cut out a piece of thin fiber board to those measurements. Now our shelves have solid bottoms.

To use the shelves, just fold and stack your clothes. Everything comes our nice and neat with no wrinkles. And we can put over a week's clothing on the four shelves that you see here.

One thing that made this particular soft shelf unit best were the two hangers that it hangs from. These make it stable in side the cabinet and it does not move around while driving. There is no noise from this unit while traveling - even with the fiberboard shelf bottoms.

We found this unit at Target. We had purchased two others at other stores. This is the only one that had two hangers and the only one that fit the space perfectly.  Some units like this have a soft tube to put around the closet rod - this type will not work with the RV closet "rod".

This method of adding shelves is inexpensive and all it takes to install it is hang it up. If you decide that you want to hang from hangers, all it takes is to take this out and let it fold flat to store.

Now, this works well, but I have been thinking about more permanent shelves in this cabinet. To do that I want to have shelves that are adjustable in height. I also want to be sure that the shelves do not move while the Roadtrek is traveling. With all of the shakes and rattles that you get when driving on even some of the smoothest roads, I don't want to add another source of noise with shelves bouncing with every bump in the road. To do this I have been looking at hardware that would let me sandwich a shelf in-between a top and a bottom clip on each corner. This is not that hard to find and stores like Home Depot and Lowes do sell systems that will let you do this (though they are not intended to use two clips in this way). Since we don't use the rear table we have been considering removing it all together and eliminating the pole in this cabinet which would limit the size of the shelves that could be fit in. One option is to cut the shelf around the pole. This is a project on the list of things to do in the Roadtrek "at some point". In the meantime the soft shelves work just fine.