Shop notes · 2026-09-27

Linen towers, medicine cabinets and over-toilet storage for a bathroom with no linen closet

The hall bath in a lot of Fremont split-levels and mid-century ranches was drawn with a tub, a toilet, a vanity and a door. Nothing else. The towels end up in a bedroom closet down the hall, the spare toilet paper sits under the sink next to the drain cleaner, and the lid of the toilet tank holds whatever did not fit anywhere.

When that room gets remodeled, the vanity gets the attention. This is about the other walls. In a small bathroom every wall that is not the vanity wall is a storage decision, and there are four answers to it: a tall tower, a cabinet recessed into the wall, a unit over the toilet, or nothing at all. Nothing is sometimes the right one.

Where does a linen cabinet go in a bathroom that has no linen closet?

A linen cabinet in a small bathroom usually goes on the short stretch of wall beside the vanity or at the end of the tub, wherever there is floor the door does not swing across and nobody walks through to reach the toilet. That strip is often under two feet wide, which is why a tower in these rooms tends to be one of the custom bathroom cabinets built to the gap rather than a catalog width.

Walk the room with a tape and check these spots:

The gap between the vanity’s side and the tub. Common in hall baths where the vanity was set a few inches short of the wall.
The short return at the foot of a tub alcove, where the tub wall ends and the door wall begins.
Behind the door, if the door opens against a stretch of blank wall. A shallow cabinet works there only when the door stop keeps the knob off its face.
The wall across from the vanity, in the longer, narrower layouts some of the split-levels have.

One more option shows up on the upper level of a split-level, where the hall bath often shares a wall with a bedroom closet. Borrowing a foot of that closet to build a linen cabinet that opens into the bathroom is a real possibility. It is a small remodel, and it depends on what is running through that wall.

How deep can a linen tower be before it crowds the door or the tub?

A linen tower can be as deep as the door’s swing allows, which in a small hall bath is often shallower than a kitchen upper. A folded bath towel wants roughly a foot of shelf, and a tower much deeper than that starts catching the door edge or your hip on the way to the sink. Measure the door’s swing first and the tower second.

The tub sets the other limit. A tower standing beside it should not stick out past the line where the shower curtain hangs, or the curtain drapes against the cabinet face every time someone showers and the bottom corner stays wet.

Then there are the tower’s own doors. A single door as wide as the tower needs that much open floor in front of it to swing, and in a bathroom that is barely wider than the tub is long, that floor is where you are standing. Two narrow doors, or drawers in the bottom half, solve it. So does a tower with an open towel shelf at the bottom and closed storage above, which also keeps the towels you use daily out where they dry.

Recessed or surface-mounted: which medicine cabinet does your wall allow?

A recessed cabinet needs an empty stud bay behind the mirror, and the wall behind a bathroom sink is the wall most likely to have something in it. The drain’s vent pipe often rises there, and wiring for the light over the mirror comes down through those same bays. If the bay is clear, recess it. If it is not, surface-mount.

The depth you gain by recessing is modest. A wall framed with 2x4s has about three and a half inches between the back of one drywall face and the other, enough for bottles and razors but not a hair dryer. Studs in houses of this era usually sit 16 inches apart, so a cabinet wider than the gap between two of them means cutting a stud and framing a header above the opening. Doable, and a bigger job than most people picture when they say “recessed.”

An outside wall is its own case. Recessing into it swaps insulation for a thin box, and in a Nebraska January the back of that cabinet runs cold enough to sweat. We steer medicine cabinets to interior walls where the room allows it.

Nothing gets opened before we know what is behind it. An outlet cover or switch plate off, a stud finder, and a small inspection hole in the exact spot the cabinet will cover anyway tell most of the story. If the bay holds a vent stack, a partially recessed cabinet is often the middle answer, with the box set into what depth is available and a shallow frame standing proud of the wall.

Is storage over the toilet worth building, and how high should it hang?

Over-toilet storage is usually worth building, because the wall above the tank is the one space in a small bathroom nobody walks through. Hang it high enough that the tank lid lifts off without hitting the cabinet and that someone standing to flush does not bump their head leaning forward. Keep it shallow, since anyone seated below it will lean back toward it.

What it replaces, in a lot of houses, is the metal shelf unit that straddles the toilet on four thin legs. Those wobble, and they stand on the floor right where cleaning behind a toilet is already miserable. A cabinet hung on the wall and screwed into studs leaves the floor clear. A full cabinet of bottles is heavier than it looks, so that fastening matters.

It is not always worth it. If the toilet sits under the window, as it does in plenty of older ranch baths, there is no wall to hang anything on. And if the room already has a tower and a medicine cabinet, a third box over the toilet can tip a small bathroom from organized to closed in. Open shelves, or bare wall, can be the better call.

What happens to a tall cabinet beside the tub in a bathroom with a weak exhaust fan?

A tall cabinet beside the tub takes the steam first. It stands in the wettest air in the room, and when the fan cannot clear that air, moisture settles on the cabinet’s sides and on the back that faces the wall. Where the cabinet sits and how much air moves around it matter as much as the finish on it.

Exhaust fans in houses from the 1970s and 80s are often small and loud, and some were never ducted all the way outside. Through a Dodge County winter the window stays shut, so that fan is the only way out for the steam. A few placement choices help a tower live with it:

Keep it off the exterior wall if the room gives you a choice. A cold wall behind a cabinet is where condensation collects.
Leave a small air space behind the back instead of pulling it tight to the drywall, and set the box on a toe kick or legs so air moves under it.
Do not tuck it into the corner behind the curtain, where the air never moves at all.

Which woods and finishes stand up to a steamy room is answered on the bathroom cabinets and vanities page. And if the mirror stays fogged long after a shower, a stronger fan ducted outside is an electrician’s job, and it will do more for every piece of wood in that room than anything a cabinet shop can build.

Should the tower and medicine cabinet match the vanity, or can they stand apart?

In a small bathroom matching is the safe choice, since one wood and one finish make several pieces read as one room. They can stand apart when the vanity is staying and the new pieces go in around it, or when the difference is on purpose, like a painted tower beside a stained vanity. A near-match that misses looks worse than either.

The near-match problem comes up most when someone keeps a vanity that has been in the room for fifteen years. A stained finish shifts color as it ages, and a new door sprayed to the original sample will not line up with the old one on the same wall. A deliberate contrast, a painted tower in a color pulled from the tile, reads as a choice. Keeping the door style the same while the color changes ties the two together without asking them to be twins.

When the vanity is being replaced too, building everything together is simpler. One finish batch, and drawings that line up the tops of the tower and the medicine cabinet with each other and with the door head. The vanity itself brings its own set of decisions about width, plumbing and sinks, covered in the guide to a custom vanity for an odd-sized bathroom.

How does a linen tower or medicine cabinet change the bathroom cabinet budget?

A linen tower or medicine cabinet is priced on top of the vanity. A built-to-order vanity runs $1,800 - $6,000 on its own, and a tower, medicine cabinet or over-toilet unit is quoted on top of that from the drawing, because its size and the wall it goes into set the price more than anything else. The vanity range sits beside the kitchen, closet and built-in ranges on the page covering what bathroom cabinetry costs.

A tower does not price well by the foot. Custom cabinetry runs about $500-$1,200 per linear foot installed, but that figure assumes long runs where boxes share sides and an install day covers many of them. A narrow tower is a whole tall cabinet in under two feet of wall, with its own sides, top, doors and trip to the house, so the per-foot math makes it look cheaper than it is.

What moves the number:

Height, and whether the tower stops short of the ceiling or runs to it.
Drawers versus shelves behind doors. Drawers cost more to build.
A recessed medicine cabinet in a wall that has to be opened and reframed, which adds drywall repair to the cabinet work.

Timing is the cheapest line to control. Adding the tower and medicine cabinet to a vanity drawing costs little at the design stage. Adding them a year later means a second measure, a second finish batch matched to the first, and a second install trip.