In this blog post, I will explain exactly how we made a bathroom sink and toilet vanity unit. The unit is made out of plywood with a solid pine cabinet face frame, inset drawers and inset shaker style doors. This was a really tricky project and the most complicated cabinet we built so far but the end result is absolutely stunning.
THE PLAN
The idea came during our recent bathroom renovation, during which we removed the existing traditional freestanding sink and toilet. The new toilet had one of those plastic cisterns that get attached to the wall, and I thought it would be lovely to not only make a unit to hide that but also extend it enough to fit a sink on top and some storage for bathroom bits like a bin, toilet paper, spare toiletries, etc.
It was quite a complicated thing to try and design so I used the free version of SketchUp to model it in 3D to fit our space exactly. The idea is to have only a narrow cabinet to hide the back of the toilet but have this join a bigger cabinet which would be big enough for the sink and the bits that come with it.
Because our existing sink fittings were to the right of the wall, it was easier to mount the sink on the right of the cabinet than have to move the fittings. Because of this, I designed the cabinet to have a bigger section on the right, over which the sink sits exactly in the centre and a smaller one on the left. The idea is to have the smaller side just be there to hold the bin in the bottom and spare toilet paper in the top drawer.
MATERIALS & TOOLS REQUIRED
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Materials
Note that sizes will vary depending on your project size so here I just put links to the required bits and what the bits are for.
- 9mm plywood for toilet cabinet, drawer bottoms and back of sink cabinet
- 12mm plywood for drawer boxes and doors
- 5mm plywood for shaker style door decoration
- 18mm plywood for the construction of the sink cabinet and the cabinet base (kick plate)
- 44mm wide solid wood planks for framing the cabinet
- Solid wood kitchen worktop – note I got mine as an absolute bargain on eBay after someone had a new kitchen put in but was left with a large piece they didn’t need
- Screws – we used an assortment of sizes, depending on the pieces being screwed together
- Pins for pinning the door decor on
- Bigger pins for nailing the sink cabinet face frame on
- Wood glue for basically everything
- Hinges for inset doors
- Door handles for the doors and drawers – we used a variety of sizes but they are all bar-style handles in stainless steel colour
- Waterproofing epoxy for the whole cabinet prior to painting
- Wood filler
- Solid paint for the body of the cabinet
- Oil or Varnish for the solid wooden top
Tools
- Drill with relevant screw and drill bits
- Note you will need to be drilling some pretty big circles to fit your sink, tap and toilet flusher
- Saw – hand saw is fine if you can get your ply cut to size in the store. Otherwise, I would recommend an electric saw with a track.
- Hammer
- Sanding block/ sander and really good quality paper
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Measuring tape
- Paintbrush
STEP 1: BUILD THE FRAME FOR THE TOILET
The first step is to build a box that will sit behind the toilet, hiding the ugly plastic cistern. We built this out of 9mm plywood as it really didn’t need to be particularly structurally stable or anything like that. We first cut the front piece and then roughly cut a rectangle from the bottom that would fit the back of the toilet. After a measure and a slight recut, it slid on perfectly. We then measured the sides and glued them on. We also used pins to make sure they stay put. Once it fit perfectly, we drilled a hole for the toilet flush mechanism and attached that to make sure it worked.
Quick tip 1
We made sure that the sides were glued and pinned to the back of the front panel so that there were no visible join lines on the front. All we would need to hide are the pin heads.
STEP 2: BUILD THE MAIN CABINET BASE TO CREATE A ‘KICK PLATE’
The purpose of a base for a cabinet like this is two-fold. Firstly, it elevates the doors off the floor for easier access, so you don’t have to get down quite as low as if they were directly on the floor. Secondly, if the base sits further back than the cabinet front, it gives some room for your feet to go when you’re standing directly in front of the cabinet. This prevents you from kicking the base every time you stand too close – a very annoying thing to do I’d imagine!
The size of a cabinet’s base will vary depending on your design, but a base that is 10cm high is within a normal range. Our base sits 10cm high and roughly 10cm back from the front of the cabinet and 10cm forward from the back of the cabinet. To build it, we cut two long 10cm wide strips of 18mm plywood to be the front and back. Then we cut some shorter strips of 18mm plywood to be the sides and a couple of inside pieces. All the shorter pieces sit inside the front and back.
Quick tip 2
The 10cm base height also conveniently comes to just above the pipework that runs along the floor in our bathroom. This is why the base doesn’t come to the back of the cabinet. It allows us to position the cabinet exactly over the top of the pipework so that the cabinet sides touch the back wall.
STEP 3: BUILD THE MAIN SINK CABINET FRAME
The next step is to build the main cabinet frame out of 18mm plywood. We got the sizes of each piece off SketchUp and precut them all. The first bits we assembled were the cabinet sides and bottom, with the bottom sitting inside the sides. For the top, we didn’t cut a full top-sized piece of ply but instead cut a piece that’s only 10cm wide for two reasons. Firstly, you won’t be able to see it, so it seems a bit of a waste. Secondly, we need to fit a sink and a tap on top of the cabinet, so leaving the top open like this means there’s less wood to drill through when we come to install those. The piece we did cut, we attached to the very front of the cabinet to hold the sides together. Later on, we will also cut an identical piece and attach it at the back.
After this main frame was done, we positioned the cabinet and cut out a few rectangles to make sure the pipework did fit, and the cabinet sides could go right up against the back wall.
Then, finally, to hide the pipework in the finished cabinet, we cut a panel to sit inside the cabinet in front of the pipework from 9mm plywood. We attached it to the cabinet by screwing some random pieces of 18mm around the back and screwing the 9mm back to them. The pictures below may make more sense, it’s kinda hard to explain. We also attached an inner side to separate the two cabinet areas and drilled a hole big enough for the sink waste pipe to fit through.
After we made sure everything fit together nicely, we screwed the cabinet to the base.
STEP 4: BUILD THE CABINET FACE FRAME
We decided to make the cabinet face frame out of solid pine wood, 44mm wide and 18mm thick. The idea is to attach it to the front of the cabinet to hide exposed plywood edges and give it a solid, professional appearance by making it look thicker. Note how we didn’t bother segmenting the main cabinet frame to determine where the drawers will go – it is just a big box with a wall in the centre. This is because we also added a couple of horizontal pieces to the frame to separate the area for the drawers.
We needed as few markings on the front of the cabinet as possible, so we bought a cheap pocket hole jig to try and join all the pieces together from the back. It went okay, but as you can see from the pictures below, the pocket holes are not the tidiest. I’m still unsure if it’s because we haven’t yet learned how to use it properly or if it’s because it’s a really cheap jig. We did find the whole process quite fiddly, so I think we will only use it in the future in the same situations as here – where we absolutely must not have any visible fixings.
To actually make the frame, we simply cut all the pieces to size and screwed and glued them together. The way this measures is that the frame sits exactly flush with the edges of the cabinet. The centre wood pieces sit where the 18mm ply edge would be exactly in the middle of them. The drawers will sit in the two small rectangle holes at the top.
We attached the face frame to the cabinet with lots of wood glue and a few pins. It completely changed the look of the cabinet box!
STEP 5: MAKE AND ATTACH THE DOORS
The doors are made using a very simple method. We cut 12mm rectangles and used thin strips of 5mm plywood to glue and pin decorative shaker-style panels to them.
Quick tip 3
Previously, when I built doors for my projects, I always left a 2mm gap all the way around each door. However, I have found that painting the doors and cabinets a solid colour really does decrease that gap. This makes fitting the doors after they are painted quite a painful task. So, for this cabinet, I left a 3mm gap around the doors and found that the gap is not too big after the painting is done, and fitting the doors back on is so much easier!
To attach the doors, we used some invisible hinges you usually see on kitchen cabinets. They come in an inset, overlay and partial overlay type. These doors are inset doors, so I purchased those hinges. I have never used these before, and apparently, I can’t do proper research, so I purchased the wrong ones! What I needed were hinges for inset doors that are designed especially for face-framed cabinets. Instead, I bought hinges for inset doors for cabinets without a face frame. The difference between the two is the length of the metal thingy that connects the door and cabinet and the angle at which the hinge opens. This means that we couldn’t attach the hinges without first building the cabinet inside walls out to be level with the face frame. To do this, we screwed a couple of scrap pieces of wood to the inside of the cabinet. It really does make it look messy on the inside, so learn from my mistake and buy the correct hinges!!! Check out the pictures below to see what I mean.
We also did attach some random small block of wood to the back of the face frame to act as door stoppers as we found that the doors swing too far inwards without them.
STEP 6: MAKE AND ATTACH THE DRAWERS
Next, we built the drawers. These were a very simple design. The drawer box is built from four 12mm thick plywood pieces. The bottom is made of 9mm thick plywood that sits inside the drawer box and is glued and pinned on. The drawer fronts are made from 18mm ply and are glued and screwed to the box. This is the exact design we followed, with the only difference being that the drawer front is the exact width of the drawer box, not wider.
We made two drawers. The one for the narrow left side goes all the way to the back of the cabinet, while the one for the wide right side does not. Remember that this is the side on which the sink is mounted, so the drawer must stop short of those fittings. This does mean that the drawer is quite small, but it is big enough to hold a few bathroom essentials like spare toothpaste and toothbrush chargers, etc.
To mount the drawers to the cabinet, we used some scrap wood to make a surface for the drawer to slide on, sides for the drawer to sit tight and a top piece for the drawers to not fall out when pulled out of the opening a bit. The pictures here will make more sense than the words:
I must admit, this is quite a messy design, and I think if we had tried hard enough, we could have made it better. But it is our first attempt at building drawers like this without runners and our first attempt at building a face-framed cabinet, so all in all, I don’t think we did too badly. Also, once the drawers are in, you really can’t see the mess, so I’m happy with the final look.
Note that, as I mentioned earlier, at this point, we also attached another 10cm wide strip of 18mm plywood across the back of the cabinet. You could do this at the start, though; there’s no reason to wait until now.
STEP 7: CUT THE CABINET TOP
For the cabinet top, I wanted a chunky solid wood top for a lovely farmhouse-type look. I stumbled across a solid oak kitchen counter cut off on eBay and snapped it up immediately. It was just a large rectangle. We measured it about ten times to ensure we got the measurements right and cut it down to the ‘L’ share that our vanity unit would ultimately be. Note that we made sure that the top overhangs the unit by about 2cm.
Quick tip 4
If you’re making a vanity unit of your own, you can literally use anything for the top. Something like a stone or marble cut-off, a cement pour or even a DIY wooden top from some rustic old planks would look lovely. The point is, you don’t have to use a kitchen counter. Remember that it will need to be made fairly waterproof, so don’t go for something like plywood if you can help.
STEP 8: PAINT THE VANITY UNIT
The painting actually took a really long time. This is because I was a bit concerned about having something made of plywood in the bathroom due to moisture, so I decided to use penetrating epoxy to try to waterproof it first. I applied the first coat and waited a week for it to dry. Then I used wood filler everywhere it needed to be used, applied a second coat of the epoxy and waited another week. Only then could I start painting the unit a solid colour. Overall, I think I did four coats of solid wood paint. Also, I should mention that I sanded the whole thing before any epoxy was applied, after the filler had dried and also in between each layer of the solid wood paint.
For the oak top, I first sanded it to be super smooth and slightly rounded all the edges off. I initially used teak oil on the top, but once we attached it, we found that it really was not holding up against the water as well as it needed to. So I sanded that oil finish off and used this Osmo Polyx-Oil. It’s a sort of mix between oil and wax, and it creates a super beautiful, durable finish. I used it all over the wooden floors in my house before, so I knew it would hold up nicely.
STEP 9: ASSEMBLE THE VANITY UNIT
The final step was to drill holes in the top for the sink and tap and fit those.
Then, we screwed the oak top to the unit. Because it’s so very heavy, we just used two screws and put them through from the inside of the cabinet and into the top through the front 10cm strip that runs wall to wall of the cabinet at the top. We didn’t even attach the top to the toilet part as it’s going absolutely nowhere.
We attached drawer and door handles, hung the doors back on and waxed the areas where the drawers will slide on for smooth operation. Then, it was finally complete. This is one of the most complicated things we built but also arguable one of the best looking. I’m very pleased with the end result, it actually turned out better than I pictured it!
