How to Remove a Medicine Cabinet

Hi everyone! I thought I would show you guys how to remove a medicine cabinet from your wall. It’s actually pretty easy. During the planning for the bathroom renovation in our teenage boys bathroom I decided to remove the medicine cabinet. Apparently medicine cabinets aren’t ‘done’ anymore. To be honest the boys don’t really use it anyway and it was basically empty. By removing it will make the space a little more open and visually clean. There will also be one less space to fill up with stuff we don’t use! Here is what the cabinet looked like. It was pretty plain/ugly. You can see part 1 of the teenage boy bathroom reno here. You can see part 2 here. Part 3 here.

The first step to removing the cabinet is to remove the door and the hinges. This is pretty easy to do. The hardest part will be finding the right screwdriver! Also remove the frame around the cabinet. I managed to get three sides of the frame removed. The fourth side didn’t want to come off so I just left it!

After that, the next thing to do is to remove the screws that are holding the cabinet in place. The medicine cabinet is fit in between two studs and the screws that you are removing are screwed through the cabinet into these studs. Once the screws are removed you can gently (or not so gently) pry out the cabinet.

And then you will be left with a lovely hole in your wall that looks something like this. You can also see that the existing drywall on the top and bottom is covering the 2 X 4. In order to add an new piece of drywall we need to make sure we have something to screw it to.

To fix this comes the messy part. Take your drywall knife and cut a nice even line along the sides that need to be fixed. Then you need to pry out the drywall ultimately making a big mess! But once that’s done you will have a nice clean opening to put in your new drywall. I managed to scrounge a small piece from my parents basement. You can find anything you need down there!

Next, cut and screw in your new piece of drywall. Then you can plaster it over to cover the cracks and the screws. This will take a few coats and of course lots of sanding. Did I mention I hate sanding! So this is what mine looks like. I haven’t put a second coat of plaster on yet. Since we are tearing this room apart I might leave it like this until after all the demolition takes place. Then I can get it finished and painted properly.