Help ! I've been framed... »Installing the new vanity cabinet...
Here's a side view of the finished bathroom vanity cabinet. The sink is not attached yet of course, but it's had 3 coats of varnish and is finally READY !! The faucet is Kohler.
I may have actually invented something here in the process, I did a bunch of research (OK, web surfing) and couldn't find anything commercially available to prevent water damage to cabinetry in the bathroom. OK, the best thing is just not splashing the water, but it doesn't take much to have that pressboard start swelling up and looking bad. My cabinet is birch hardwood veneer plywood, and plywood is more tolerant of water than pressboard, but not much. Repeated exposure to water will mess it up in the end. So I added a 3/4" strip of solid maple all around the bottom of the cabinet. Varnished solid maple will be much more tolerant of repeated exposure to water. The best thing is it's removeable, so if it ever gets damaged I can just yank the cabinet and swap it out and Presto ! New cabinet. At 3/4" high it will resist all but the largest bathroom floods. Besides, at 3/4" my bedroom will be a swimming pool !
Here the cabinet is finally installed and hooked up in the master bathroom. It's not quite done yet, still needs some doors and a shelf on the inside for storage. My wife wants to keep an oversized hair dryer in the cabinet, so I elected to skip drawers and just do two doors instead. The shelf will be a little tricky to do after the installation, it needs a cutout in the back to avoid hitting the shut off valve. Still, I wanted to maximize the storage space so I decided to wait until the cabinet was mounted to size the shelf.
No description would be complete without a "before" picture, so here's the bathroom when we moved in. The original cabinet was the $119 special from the hardware store, all pressboard and completely water damaged. The cheapo linoleum floor was replaced with tile and the shower (not visible here) was gutted and rebuilt.
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