How to Build a Recessed Medicine Cabinet

In our case, this should be titled “How to Re-Build a Recessed Medicine Cabinet;” however, many of the same themes could be used if you want to build one from scratch. In our case, we decided to renovate the bathroom in the older part of our 80 year old home, which was built in the Craftsman style and has many nice features, including beveled glass and oak accents. While I wanted to keep with the many of the original features while gutting and remodeling our bathroom, I wanted updates that would at least look like they came with the house.

Bathroom fixtures are now calling back to the art deco and Craftsman days of the 1920s, and it was fairly easy to find a sink, bathtub, and light fixtures that carried these themes. When it came to the medicine cabinet, however, I was stymied. Modern medicine cabinets looked too modern. The one we had was wood, recessed into the wall, and featured a beveled mirror, something you just can’t find new these days. Modern recessed cabinets appear to be built from plywood, which wouldn’t hold up well in a steamy, hot bathroom.

Eventually, we decided to make due with some of the parts of the cabinet we had. I mainly wanted to keep just the beveled mirrored door. To my surprise, the contractor managed to extricate the entire cabinet from the wall without damaging it at all. In fact, the interior of the cabinet appeared to be very well built. He determined that the wood was good enough to use again, even after 80 years of paint. We couldn’t tell what kind of wood was underneath the paint, but would strip everything off and later make a determination on how to proceed after looking at it. The hardware on the mirrored door, which included a piano hinge and latch, was rusted and would need to be replaced.

My contractor measured the space exactly, since we were at the very least going to reuse the mirrored door. He managed to center the cabinet space, which was not centered in the bathroom before. He then framed in the rest of the bathroom for the walls.

We were prepared for having to redo the entire interior of the box, which would include a frame around the door of the medicine cabinet. My contractor had already purchased an oak that matched the vanity and closely matched the old wood in the rest of the house, in case he had to rebuild the outside frame from scratch. My job included trying to find matching brass hardware to replace the hardware that was rusted.

After a few weeks of stripping the paint from the cabinet, we learned that the wood was actually pine and not oak. However, it was smooth and in extremely good condition, even the wood from the interior box. Due to the fact that the bathroom doesn’t have a window, we decided to paint the cabinet in an enameled paint, instead of staining it to match the cabinet I had purchased for the sink. We decided that staining it would close in the already small room with too much brown.

Luckily, stripping the cabinet of the many years of paint made it the perfect size to return into the wall. We also found that the shelving within the cabinet is much like when it was first installed in 1927.

Finally, we replaced the hardware with a similar style to the rest of the older section of the house, and now it looks good as new.

The cost for materials to rebuild our recessed medicine cabinet came to $10, and that was for the hardware. Most of the rebuild was invested as elbow grease in sanding and removing paint.

I imagine that making a recessed cabinet from scratch would present the same logistical problems, such as figuring out the size, figuring out the door(s), and figuring out the shelving. A person who is a somewhat decent carpenter could probably build one for less than $50 in wood. If you want something custom to your own designs or tastes, I would strongly urge that you try doing it yourself.