atomicmike
Member
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2010
- Messages
- 190
Last year (and a good part of the year before that), I remodeled my bathroom. Part of that involved moving the tub/shower to a more logical location to open up the room. Since the new location was about 6 feet long, that left me with the dilemma of spending several thousand dollars extra on a 6-foot tub, or using a standard 5-foot tub, and walling off the extra space. Not wanting to spend the extra money, and not wanting to completely waste the space, I came up with a solution...
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I can't actually take full credit for the idea; I saw something similar on an episode of This Old House a few years ago (can't remember which project it was, though). The rough opening for the storage was just under 9 inches, so there was not a whole lot of space to work with. I used 1/2" ply for the drawer boxes, and Blum undermount slides to try to maximize width. The accent lighting wasn't part of the original plan, but luckily I'd decided to add it early enough that I could still pull wiring in and add a light switch inside the lower cabinet.
Finding the right hardware to do the accent lighting was actually the hardest part of the project. Since the drawers are so small, heat was a big concern, making LEDs the only option. The other concern was finding a light that could still be recessed with such thin materials; the ones I found (Hera's Eye-LED) ended up being perfect, requiring only a 1" diameter by 1/2" deep recess. To hide the lighting, I ran it through grooves in the top and right side of the drawer box and hot-glued it into place. The top was then covered with a piece of 1/4" ply hot-glued into place to cover everything up.
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The trickiest part of the hardware for me was a solution to keep the wires from getting caught up or damaged as the drawers slide in and out. I had originally planned on building some small articulated arms (much like are used on rack-mount servers for cable management), until I stumbled across some very small cable chains. I used a Domino sticking out of the back of each drawer to attach one end of the chain, with the other attached to cross-bracing below each set of drawer slides. The wire for the light slips easily into the chain, and the chain then clips to the two attachment points. Inside the cabinet, I ran the wire from each drawer down a groove in the side, which I covered up using a metal transition strip cut into small pieces. The lights all connect to a transformer in the bottom of the cabinet, which is plugged into a switched receptacle. I tried to make sure that all of the wiring and lights can be removed and replaced if needed without having to destroy anything.
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The storage provided by the drawers has proved to be invaluable; I just wish I'd made them a little bit deeper to use more of the space behind the shower, but it's nothing I'm losing sleep over. [wink] Feel free to ask any questions, or offer feedback or suggestions. This bathroom was my first remodeling and cabinetry project (and actually the reason I started buying Festools), so it was a fun and at times challenging experience.
For anyone interested in the chronicles of the rest of the remodel project, I made a series of blog posts as I went along: http://atomicmike.com/category/home-ownership/bathroom-remodel/. I still shudder when I look back at those photos of what the bathroom used to look like. [scared]
- Mike
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I can't actually take full credit for the idea; I saw something similar on an episode of This Old House a few years ago (can't remember which project it was, though). The rough opening for the storage was just under 9 inches, so there was not a whole lot of space to work with. I used 1/2" ply for the drawer boxes, and Blum undermount slides to try to maximize width. The accent lighting wasn't part of the original plan, but luckily I'd decided to add it early enough that I could still pull wiring in and add a light switch inside the lower cabinet.
Finding the right hardware to do the accent lighting was actually the hardest part of the project. Since the drawers are so small, heat was a big concern, making LEDs the only option. The other concern was finding a light that could still be recessed with such thin materials; the ones I found (Hera's Eye-LED) ended up being perfect, requiring only a 1" diameter by 1/2" deep recess. To hide the lighting, I ran it through grooves in the top and right side of the drawer box and hot-glued it into place. The top was then covered with a piece of 1/4" ply hot-glued into place to cover everything up.
[attachthumb=#] [attachthumb=#]
The trickiest part of the hardware for me was a solution to keep the wires from getting caught up or damaged as the drawers slide in and out. I had originally planned on building some small articulated arms (much like are used on rack-mount servers for cable management), until I stumbled across some very small cable chains. I used a Domino sticking out of the back of each drawer to attach one end of the chain, with the other attached to cross-bracing below each set of drawer slides. The wire for the light slips easily into the chain, and the chain then clips to the two attachment points. Inside the cabinet, I ran the wire from each drawer down a groove in the side, which I covered up using a metal transition strip cut into small pieces. The lights all connect to a transformer in the bottom of the cabinet, which is plugged into a switched receptacle. I tried to make sure that all of the wiring and lights can be removed and replaced if needed without having to destroy anything.
[attachthumb=#] [attachthumb=#] [attachthumb=#]
The storage provided by the drawers has proved to be invaluable; I just wish I'd made them a little bit deeper to use more of the space behind the shower, but it's nothing I'm losing sleep over. [wink] Feel free to ask any questions, or offer feedback or suggestions. This bathroom was my first remodeling and cabinetry project (and actually the reason I started buying Festools), so it was a fun and at times challenging experience.
For anyone interested in the chronicles of the rest of the remodel project, I made a series of blog posts as I went along: http://atomicmike.com/category/home-ownership/bathroom-remodel/. I still shudder when I look back at those photos of what the bathroom used to look like. [scared]
- Mike
