Ideas for Building Bathroom Cabinets Over the Toilet
You could buy a nice bathroom cabinet to go over the stool, but it most likely won’t match your existing cupboards. Over the toilet cabinets can be custom made to match what you already have. One of the problems you may encounter is that if you have special order doors on your vanities, you may have difficulty finding an exact match.
In this article, I’m going to give a few suggestions that can help you with this project.
What size should the cabinet over the toilet be?
We generally make them about thirty inches high and no deeper than eight and a half inches (8-1/2″), over all. The width can be whatever you decide. Most toilets are in the neighborhood of twenty (20″) to twenty four inches (24″) wide. Keeping in sync with the symmetry of the stool makes for a good design.
Just a quick note interior design note about heights, make sure your cabinet is going to look good in relation to the height of the wall mirror. If the cupboard gets installed right next to the mirror, the size of the cabinet is going to be a rather important design decision on your part.
A nice looking design usually has a towel bar toward the bottom of the cabinet. In the past, we have used one and a half inch thick wood dowel rods and covered them with cloths rod vinyl covering material for the towel bar. This works especially well with white cabinets since the vinyl is white. By taking a look at a home center, you will find something that will work for this application. While you are there looking at the displays for Home Depot cabinets is a great way to get ideas for your project.
Bathroom cabinets over the toilet can have doors or open shelves only. I suppose that in order to save money you could build an open shelf style. If you are having difficulty finding the right door style, not having any would solve that problem.
How would you find the right door style to match existing vanity cabinets?
Finding Doors
I would start by looking on the Internet. There are hundreds of door manufactures/suppliers that can be found through doing a search on Google. My next choice would be to contact a local cabinet manufacture. They usually have several different suppliers catalogs and display doors on hand.
If you cannot find a manufactured brand name door to match yours, the chances are good that you have a custom door manufacture in your area. We have two of them in the small South Florida city I live in. Just keep in mind that it’s important to It’s important to match existing cabinets next to the toilet.
Oftentimes, the original fabricators of your bathroom vanities will have a company name on a sticker somewhere on the cupboards. This may be a bit extreme, but sometimes if you remove a decorative drawer front from the drawer, there’s a manufactures label on the back of the decorative front.
That’s about it for my ideas for building bathroom toilet cabinets. The rest will be up to you. Much of your success will be dependent upon your level of finish carpentry skills. If you would like to expand your project consider making a three mirror medicine cabinet as well.
The quality of tools you use to get the job done will have a great effect on the result of what your toilet cabinet looks like. Trying to make anything with hand tools alone is too old school for this day and age we are living. If you are not properly equipped to handle the project, I’d suggest hiring someone to build your over the stool cupboard for you.