DIY Mirrored Medicine Cabinet Frame

Add a quick and easy DIY frame to a plain mirrored bathroom medicine cabinet!

So the building we just moved out of is about 10 years old and built by a condo developer which means that someone in an interior design office probably chose a lot of the standard features and fixtures mostly based on price. Which is totally fine. But that means things like our bathroom medicine cabinet were what we would call “builder basic”. Perfectly acceptable but vanilla, bland and basic. So our medicine cabinet was been one of those things that I pretty much ignored for the last four years.

I ignored it, that is, until one day when I was blow drying my hair when I bumped the lower corner of the mirrored door with my hair dryer (not even hard, I swear!) and a big shard of glass came off.  Ugh! This is the kind of home improvement thing I HATE dealing with because unfortunately although the damage was pretty small, the corner was now super sharp. And so you can’t really just leave it that way. Nor is there a medicine cabinet repair company in the phone book to call. And because it was a builder basic medicine cabinet there are no manufacturer’s markings and no way to figure out how to replace only the door. Obviously I’d hate to throw out an entirely functional medicine cabinet just because of a little chipped glass.  (And can we take a short pause to also appreciate the *awesome* way the builders dealt with the light switch cover here? (sarcasm intended))

So I looked online and then kind of freaked out about how much medicine cabinets cost. Which is when I stuck my head in the sand, covered the chipped edge with tape and proceeded to ignore it for several months. But we had just sold our condo and my in-laws were moving in so I knew I had to deal with it for them.  About a month ago I got some small pieces of wood from my stash and made a DIY frame that covered the sharp chipped edge and actually makes the medicine cabinet look better!

First I held up the wood to see how I was going to use it. I decided that I would have two pieces on each edge, one that sat on the front face…

and one that wrapped around to cover the edge of the glass.

Does that make sense? So the cross section once I glued those two pieces along the length looked like an L shape:

I measured and cut the pieces for the vertical sides first and the next step was to paint the BACK side that would be up against the face of the mirror white. Because that will get reflected back in the mirror.

Then I stopped at Home Depot and got this construction adhesive that specifically said it would bond wood to glass (spoiler alert: it works great!)

When the white paint on the back side was dry, I applied a thin bead of this glue and glued the vertical pieces to the mirror, using small clamps to hold them tight.

I let that dry for 24 hours and then made the top and bottom pieces. Because they needed to cover the raw bottom edges of the vertical pieces, they looked like this:

I glued those on, waited and then applied a little spackle to the joints. (I didn’t have wood filler. oh well.)

When the spackle was dry, I lightly sanded it smooth and then taped off the mirror on the inside and gave it three coats of the same white eggshell latex paint that we used on the rest of the trim in the bathroom. 

The finished product! A more polished looking medicine cabinet and no more sharp, pointy edge! Hooray!

If you liked this, you may like some of my other posts…

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Cassie May

Craft and Knitwear Designer at Little Red Window Design

Welcome to Little Red Window! I’m Cassie, a professional craft and knitwear designer working in the field for more than 10 years. I have a degree in Art History from Northwestern University and a Master's Degree in Architecture and Design from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I've designed more than 300 separate knitting patterns, hundreds of craft projects, and I love to bring joy to your crafts and knitting with well-designed, easy to understand tutorials and patterns.

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