Wood’n Bits Workshop

Location, Location, Location….and Available Space

Larry | February 1, 2010

We often find ourselves building a cabinet or furniture piece for a particular space. I thought it might be useful to report on my actions as I stumble through the design and creation of a set of bathroom cabinets.

I must start with a confession. Years ago, in a galaxy far, far away…no, that’s another story. A long time ago, I decided to remodel a small bathroom in our house. As with most projects I jumped in with both feet and ripped out the walls, mouldings, fixtures, etc. I installed new drywall, a new floor substrate, painted, installed mouldings, added a ceramic tile floor and installed new fixtures. It was a great day when the toilet and sink became operational.

We all have projects that stall and, for me, this was one. I ran off and had my prostate removed. I took advantage of the “don’t lift stuff – and I mean it” prescription to learn SketchUp.

But the bathroom was still in my mind and so I drew it, at least as much to see if I could as anything else. This sort of thing is made easier because of the SketchUp 3D Warehous\\ where you can get SketchUp models of fixtures, windows, lights, etc. In the end, I had a good model of the bathroom.

Much to my wife’s chagrin, I procrastinated on the bathroom project until I needed yet another operation. At the time I thought this pretty sneaky on my part but the bathroom project didn’t go away. And so it is that I now need to build some cabinetry for the room. My marching orders require that I:

1) Provide a mirror for my wife to admire her beauty.

2) A shelf where my wife can place bottles of “stuff” that have something to do with her beauty.

3) Vanity cabinet space sufficient for the rest of the bottles and maybe a toothbrush or three.

4) A small cabinet for toilet paper.

In addition to these minimums I am not allowed to have any cabinet space above 6-feet as my wife isn’t very tall. There are also the more typical dimensional limits for cabinets overhanging sinks and around toilets.

So with this work order I used my bathroom drawing to play around with cabinet and mirror sizes, generating this simple graphic. Note that I’m not dealing with design details here. This experience was valuable as it let me look at and determine the overall dimensions within the confines of the space and requirements. The vanity cabinets shown are 14″ wide, 26″ tall, and 6″ deep.

Using these overall dimensions, I hope to design two cabinets that will satisfy. At this point I’m envisioning something similar to a single-door version of this Tom Fidgen cabinet. While Tom used paper as the panel insert, I’m thinking that frosted glass might be better in a bathroom. Tom suggests there’s never a reason to build more than one small cabinet in a particular style but maybe I’ve found a reason to build two.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com