Measuring guide

Take four numbers, not two

Width and height are the two everyone measures, and they are the two least likely to cause a problem. Depth and clearance are what send cabinets back.

• Width of the gap, measured at the floor and again at cabinet height. Walls are rarely parallel, and the narrower of the two is the one that counts.
• Height available, measured to the lowest thing overhead: a windowsill, a boxed pipe, a sloping ceiling.
• Depth from the wall to the nearest fixed obstacle, which in a bathroom is usually the bath rim or the basin pedestal.
• Clearance for anything that moves: the door of the room, a shower screen, a drawer in the unit opposite.

The door swing

This is the failure. A bathroom door opening inward sweeps an arc roughly its own width across the floor, and a cabinet that stands in that arc will stop the door with a bang the first time somebody opens it quickly. Open the door fully, mark the floor where the leading edge passes, and measure from there.

The same applies to your own cabinet doors. A cupboard needs its door width again in front of it to open past ninety degrees. In a room three feet across, two facing cabinets can be individually fine and collectively unusable.

What to subtract

Take half an inch off the width you measured before you compare it to a listing. Skirting boards, pipe boxing and plaster that is not quite flat all eat into a gap, and a cabinet that fits to the millimetre cannot be got into position without scraping a wall.

For depth, subtract two inches beyond the cabinet itself if the cabinet stands against a wall with a socket, a pipe or a radiator valve behind it.

Getting it into the room

Measure the route as well as the destination. A 67-inch cabinet assembled in a hallway will not turn through a standard bathroom door, and several of our tall models are built lying flat and then stood upright, which needs the diagonal of the room to be longer than the cabinet.

The safe order is: carry the flat pack into the room where the cabinet will stand, open it there, and build it in place.

Floors are the last thing to check. Old bathroom floors slope towards the drain and old timber floors bounce. Both will make a tall cabinet rock, and both are fixed with a folded shim under one corner before the wall strap goes on, not after.