How to Choose a Medicine Cabinet

Give your bathroom a stylish makeover

For all the time you spend every day looking at it, you probably don't think much about your medicine cabinet. To most people, medicine cabinets are simply a place to store toothpaste, aspirin, and razors, and the mirror comes in handy for combing your hair or applying makeup in the morning. What you may not realize, however, is how much a medicine cabinet can impact the look of your bathroom and that installing a new cabinet is a surprisingly easy way to give the whole room a stylish facelift.

Styles When shopping for a new medicine cabinet for your bathroom remodel, you generally have two distinct styles to choose from. Surface-mount medicine cabinets are the easiest to install, hanging on the wall much the same way a picture frame does. Depending on how far you're willing to let the cabinet stick out from the wall, surface-mount medicine cabinets are available in a wide range of depths, with the average being about around 4 inches. The second type of medicine cabinet, recessed style, actually sits in a hole cut into the wall so that the mirror sits nearly flush with the wall. Unless you're replacing an existing recessed cabinet, this style requires substantially more work to install than surface-mount cabinets. Still, the clean, built-in look of recessed medicine cabinets often justifies the extra effort of installing them.

If you are removing a small recessed cabinet and do not wish to cut out the existing studs for a larger recessed cabinet, simply fill the hole with insulation and place a larger surface mount cabinet over the opening. If your bathroom is on the small side, a corner medicine cabinet is perfect for using space efficiently, while specialized medicine cabinets such as perfume cabinet can be used to add an elegant touch to most any bathroom.

Features
Once you've decided which style to buy, you'll be faced with a multitude of features to choose from. Hinged or sliding mirrored doors, lighting options, and adjustable shelving are just a few of the options you can select from in order to get the most stylish, functional medicine cabinet for your bathroom.

Medicine cabinets made of wood, plastic, or aluminum are best for the high-humidity environments of bathrooms but metal cabinets coated with a baked-on enamel finish will also be sufficiently rust-resistant. Also look for strong hinges such as piano, scissor, or European style that are capable of supporting the heavy mirrored doors of medicine cabinets.