Our master bathroom has 9’ ceilings, which gives a nice lofty feeling to a small space. The changing area is about 7’ by 8’ with a 7’ vanity on one side and doors to the closets and bath tub / toilet on the other two walls. It has a nice 42” inch tall mirror that runs the length of the vanity and a Hollywood style light fixture over the mirror, after that nothing but open space to the ceiling.
To give us more storage space I built a set of two cabinets that run the length of the wall over the vanity. The cabinets are 18” deep and 20” tall and two doors per cabinet. The cabinets are anchored to the wall with 2 1/2” #10 screws. I drove screws into the top plate and the studs.
I removed the light fixture and put a set of six cabinet mounted halogen lights on the underside of the cabinet. These lights run on 110V and are fully dimmable. The lights are mounted on the bottom of the cabinet facing down toward the counter. I used six lights for our 7’ wide vanity. The counter is beautifully illuminated. The biggest down side is that the lights do not illuminate the face as well. This is something that you should consider when considering the lighting for your bathroom.
Something else to pay attention to is the clearance between the ceiling fan and the cabinet. When the ceiling fan was off there was just enough space to open the door when the fan blade was positioned just so. Well, that lasted all of about a week before accidentally one of the cabinet doors was opened while the fan was running. As you can imagine, there was a rather loud noise and the fan blade was bent. 40 dollars later and a shorter down rod fixed this problem. Now the ceiling fan’s blades are about four inches above the top of the cabinet’s doors.
