In some ways, week 29 of the remodel felt a bit anticlimactic: the giant pile of kitchen cabinets had been delivered in week 28, and I really expected to see them installed when we visited this weekend, but alas: it wasn’t meant to be.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t forward progress, of course. We now have trim and window sills for most of the windows, one notable exception being the kitchen window that still hasn’t arrived, as well as trim around the new closets, upstairs and down. The biggest development, however, was the installation of the cabinets in the bathrooms upstairs.

The bathroom cabinets, unlike the kitchen cabinets, are all stock pieces. They’re of a similar style to the custom components in the kitchen, so they’ll be reasonably well-matched, but it was much cheaper to go with off-the-shelf products rather than a bespoke solution.

There’s nothing especially interesting about the cabinets in the boys’ bathroom. The only tough decision we faced was whether to include towers on one or both ends of the counter to store linens and towels. Ultimately we decided not to go that route, but I’m open to the possibility that we will eventually wish we had.

Things were a little more interesting in Julia’s bathroom. The cabinet under the sink is mundane: there’s not much you can do with the amount of space we have there. However, we’d set aside a large area for storage next to the shower, and we wrestled with the question of what to do with it for some time.

The space in question is fairly wide and deep—nearly closet-sized—and we wanted to use as much of it as possible. However, we also envisioned using the floor in that area for a litter box, so that Felix wouldn’t have far to go in the evening when he’s in bed with Julia. That ruled out any sort of floor-to-ceiling arrangement, and left us to figure out what kind of storage we could float a few feet off the ground, leaving room for Felix’s facilities.

We weighed a few different possibilities, including building a completely configuration with built-in shelves and a door, but ultimately ended up with going with a stock set of deep cabinets mounted to the wall. This doesn’t make full use of the space: as you can see in the photo, the cabinets are recessed relative to the surrounding wall, and they don’t fill the full width of the space, but we think there will be more than enough room to store towels and Julia’s bathroom essentials. That said, I don’t envy the future realtor who, decades from now, will have to explain away this somewhat idiosyncratic configuration.

Cabinetry aside, we encountered a minor setback this week regarding the sink in the laundry room. Enzo reached out mid-week to let us know that the sink we’d purchased months ago would’t readily fit in the cabinet we’d purchased: it was too wide. He offered to try to cut the cabinet to make it work, but warned that it most likely wouldn’t look good: the sink would sit off-center relative to the cabinet, projecting out into the work area next to the dryer.

That didn’t seem like a good approach, so we instead embarked on a search to find a sink that would fit into the limited horizontal space we have, while still providing a reasonably deep basin. After no small amount of digging around, we finally found something that seems like it will work, and it ended up being significantly less expensive than the unit we had selected previously. It’s undoubtedly not as aesthetically appealing as the original choice—it’s a drop-in model, rather than an under-mount sink, if nothing else—but it will get the job done, and we’re happy to prioritize saving money over aesthetics in a functional space like the laundry room.

Gallery: Week 29: Bathroom Cabinets