Title: Medicine Cabinet
Post by: HiLola on May 16, 2025, 09:29:34 pm
Post by: HiLola on May 16, 2025, 09:29:34 pm
Looked in the archives but couldn’t find much recent info. We would like to update the lame factory medicine cabinet in our Midbath. Something a little wider, deeper, and perhaps a bit longer than stock. Oh yeah, and one that doesn’t use Velcro to latch. Any ideas you would like to share?
Title: Re: Medicine Cabinet
Post by: Andy Baird on May 16, 2025, 09:53:55 pm
Post by: Andy Baird on May 16, 2025, 09:53:55 pm
OK, here's where I'm going to get wordy by quoting from the old Eureka website. :-)
A couple I met on the road had a new RV with no medicine cabinet. What they had was a narrow counter with a full-width mirror over it and a few shelves underneath. So my friend Kate and I did a "bathroom makeover" on their rig, installing a medicine cabinet and a high shelf.
We chose an inexpensive ($30) white medicine cabinet from Home Depot. Because the mirror covered the entire wall over the sink, and we didn't want to cut the glass, the question was how to mount the medicine cabinet so that it would be secure when going down the road. Gluing it to the glass with double-sided adhesive was ruled out as not strong enough.
So instead of mounting it to the wall, we wedged it firmly between the counter and a shelf above it (which we also installed), using spacer blocks cut from 1x4 lumber. We mounted the high shelf to the wall above the mirror using angle brackets, so it was firmly fixed in place. And of course the built-in counter was quite solid... so between them, the medicine chest was very secure, even though it had no connection at all to the mirrored wall behind it.
But there's more. In my midbath, I built a second, shallow medicine cabinet just for medicines above the bathroom window. I built it from a few lengths of thin 2.5" x 1/4" poplar, plus a piece of scrap composition board for the door, sizing it to just fill the space above the window. Just as four inches is the perfect depth for a pantry cupboard, two to two and a half inches is just right for all those small medicine bottles, tubes and boxes.
Like my pantry cupboard, I built this with no back—the wall behind it serves that purpose. It's just an open frame, mounted to the wall with four small angle brackets, while additional angle brackets support the shelf inside. I added retainer rods made of white coat hanger wire to keep the contents from falling out.
The hardest part about making it was finding screws short enough that they wouldn't go right through the thin wood and stick out the other side. In fact, I couldn't—I ended up having to grind off the tips of the screws with a Dremel tool. Using thicker wood would have avoided this, but I had a small space to fit into, and wanted to maximize the usable volume of the cabinet.
I wasn't completely satisfied, though—the small items on the lower shelf, especially the tubes, tended to wind up in a jumbled heap. Here's what I mean:
So I stapled a strip of 1"-wide elastic across that area, and now everything is nice and neat.
The first time I tried this, I put the elastic halfway up the space... but then discovered that it was difficult to remove or replace the items. Keeping it low (about an inch above the shelf) worked much better.
I hope this gives you some ideas!
A couple I met on the road had a new RV with no medicine cabinet. What they had was a narrow counter with a full-width mirror over it and a few shelves underneath. So my friend Kate and I did a "bathroom makeover" on their rig, installing a medicine cabinet and a high shelf.
We chose an inexpensive ($30) white medicine cabinet from Home Depot. Because the mirror covered the entire wall over the sink, and we didn't want to cut the glass, the question was how to mount the medicine cabinet so that it would be secure when going down the road. Gluing it to the glass with double-sided adhesive was ruled out as not strong enough.
So instead of mounting it to the wall, we wedged it firmly between the counter and a shelf above it (which we also installed), using spacer blocks cut from 1x4 lumber. We mounted the high shelf to the wall above the mirror using angle brackets, so it was firmly fixed in place. And of course the built-in counter was quite solid... so between them, the medicine chest was very secure, even though it had no connection at all to the mirrored wall behind it.
But there's more. In my midbath, I built a second, shallow medicine cabinet just for medicines above the bathroom window. I built it from a few lengths of thin 2.5" x 1/4" poplar, plus a piece of scrap composition board for the door, sizing it to just fill the space above the window. Just as four inches is the perfect depth for a pantry cupboard, two to two and a half inches is just right for all those small medicine bottles, tubes and boxes.
Like my pantry cupboard, I built this with no back—the wall behind it serves that purpose. It's just an open frame, mounted to the wall with four small angle brackets, while additional angle brackets support the shelf inside. I added retainer rods made of white coat hanger wire to keep the contents from falling out.
The hardest part about making it was finding screws short enough that they wouldn't go right through the thin wood and stick out the other side. In fact, I couldn't—I ended up having to grind off the tips of the screws with a Dremel tool. Using thicker wood would have avoided this, but I had a small space to fit into, and wanted to maximize the usable volume of the cabinet.
I wasn't completely satisfied, though—the small items on the lower shelf, especially the tubes, tended to wind up in a jumbled heap. Here's what I mean:
So I stapled a strip of 1"-wide elastic across that area, and now everything is nice and neat.
The first time I tried this, I put the elastic halfway up the space... but then discovered that it was difficult to remove or replace the items. Keeping it low (about an inch above the shelf) worked much better.
I hope this gives you some ideas!
Title: Re: Medicine Cabinet
Post by: HiLola on May 17, 2025, 01:49:21 pm
Post by: HiLola on May 17, 2025, 01:49:21 pm
Hi Andy, appreciate your post! I like the upper cabinet you built. We have a little rack there but it doesn't hold much. Since our mirror doesn't extend the entire length of the bathroom bulkhead, it makes it easy to go with a larger medicine cabinet. The placement of the 120V outlet and shower light switch does limit how much deeper and longer a new cabinet can be, though.