Living with Art: Picture Frame as a Door for a Medicine Cabinet

This week’s Living with Art project lets you display some fantastic wall art in your bathroom without using wall space.  WHAT OH NO THAT’S CRAZY!  I know.  Take deep breaths, and follow me.

When my husband and I bought our house, we had a basic mirrored medicine cabinet in our bathroom, much like this one:

Okay, ours probably cost about $100 less than that one.  Details.  Anyway, I am FAR more interested in looking at a cool piece of artwork than I am in looking at my own sorry face, so I asked my husband to remove that mirrored door, post haste.  (Besides, things are oddly configured in our bathroom.  We have a mirror over the sink, like decent Americans, but we also have the medicine cabinet right beside the sink, and it had another mirror!  Enough with the reflective surfaces already!  Sheesh!)

 

The idea here is to replace that old boring mirrored door with a cool picture frame that contains art.  As an unexpected bonus, it also more or less conceals your medicine cabinet, the better to hide your butt cream.

If you, too, would like to replace your dull door with a picture frame, follow these steps:

• Measure your cabinet and find a thick wood (or wood composite) frame that is the same size or slightly larger.  If you don’t have one around the house that fits the bill, try Goodwill.  You can get brilliant frames there for under $5.

• Select artwork that fits into your frame and pop it on in there.  In our case, for sentimental reasons, we went with a 19th-century engraving of a gypsy that we bought when we lived in Boston.  You could choose original artwork, a set of ATCs or postcards, a favorite illustration from a book – whatever you have.

• Once you have your art securely framed, open the cabinet and remove the screws holding the existing door in place.  Take off the hinges and the old door.  Burn them.  (Okay, okay, don’t burn them.  If you rent, put them somewhere safe.  You might want them again when you move out.)
• Get 3-4 new hinges.  The quantity depends on the weight of your frame.  Ours is heavy, so we went with 4.
• Attach the new hinges to the existing holes in the cabinet.  Be sure to use FLAT HEAD screws.
• If you need to drill additional holes in the cabinet to accommodate the new hinges, you can – but don’t feel that you have to have two screws per hinge.  We used just one per hinge on the cabinet side, but two per hinge on the frame side.

• Once the hinges are in place, have a partner / neighbor / stack of books / talented cat hold up the frame where it will hang when open.  Trace the empty holes in the hinges where they meet the door.  This way, you’ll know exactly where to make pilot holes when you drill into the frame.
• Drill all necessary holes in the frame and screw the frame onto the cabinet.

• Last steps!  Locate the magnet on your cabinet.  (That’s what allows you to keep the door closed.  You know.  To hide the butt cream.)

• Swing the door closed and mark with a finger (or a marker, or whatever) the place where the magnet will make contact with the frame.  Add additional screws (we used three.)  Now . . .

 

Wow!  Cool!  Art!  AND HIDDEN BUTT CREAM!