Bathroom Cabinet Kick Plate Makeover

I finally tackled the ugly vinyl cabinet kick plate in our bathroom. While a kick plate or toe kick serves a purpose, especially in the kitchen, I’m not thrilled about the kitchen cabinet look in my bathrooms. I wanted the vanity to look more like a custom piece of furniture, so I decided to rip the vinyl off and build the bottom out, to give the vanity the look of a dresser or built-in piece of furniture.

Check out my cabinet kick plate makeover below!

Let me walk you through what I did to my vanity toe kick.

Cabinet Kick Plate Makeover with Molding

Here is what the builder’s standard cabinet looked like before the makeover. I really dislike the cheap-looking piece of vinyl the builder glued to the cabinet toe kick.

When I removed the vinyl toe kick, this is what I was left with. A hardened glue mess. Yuck!

Supplies needed for the cabinet kick plate makeover

• interior 2×4 lumber (one piece)
• liquid nails (HERE)
• coping saw (click HERE)
• pencil
• measuring tape
• miter saw (I have an electrical one but a hand miter saw works too)
• doorjam undercut saw (click HERE)
• drill and small drill bit
• finishing nails
• hammer
• paintable caulk (HERE)
• decorative molding in the same height as the toe kick of the vanity – make sure to measure your vanity! (I like buying my molding at Home Depot because they let you cut the molding to the size you need and don’t make you buy a large piece)

Step-by-step project instructions

When I thought about how I wanted to tackle this little makeover, I noticed that the depth of the toe kick notch-out fit two 2x4s exactly. See the below photos:

If you are a professional wood-worker, please don’t cringe, cry or ram your head against a wall. I know this isn’t what you would do. So you probably should just move on since I’m just some stay-at-home-mommy doing my thing. Ok? No hurt feelings 😉 The end result looks great though.

So I attached them with liquid nails. Sometimes I just prefer using that magical glue. I didn’t want to use too much force attaching them with nails or screws. It worked great!

Can you also see that I cut the little white piece that stuck out on the side with a doorjam undercut saw. I only had to protect the side of the cabinet with a towel.

Then I moved to cutting out the side molding. And yes I could have (or maybe should have) removed the wall molding and cut that to size instead of doing it the way that I did it but for me it was easier this way. And I can’t remove the vanity since the floor was built around it. So if we ever do something different in this powder room, it will have to be a total removal of everything anyway.

I marked the profile onto my molding.

And then I used a coping saw to cut out the shape. This sounds harder than it actually is. I have used the coping saw before for when I put up our crown molding. A coping saw is pretty easy to use and maneuver to cut out a profile on molding.

Here is what the piece looked like after.

I had to do this twice for both sides of the vanity that meet the wall molding.

Then I moved on to cutting the two 45-degree angles that you can see in the below photo that meet on the corner of the cabinet. I used my power miter saw but you can use a hand saw too which works pretty easily.

To attach the toe kick molding to the vanity, I had to pre-drill holes on the molding for the finishing nails, then hammered the nails in and caulked all the small gaps.

After that I primed the molding one more time, even though I bought primed base molding.

And two coats of white paint and voila here is the vanity after in white.

I also painted the walls with a cheap sharpie wall treatment and my DIY painted handtowel.

Check out my black and white stencil makeover of the powder room.

Don’t you think the vanity looks much better without the cabinet kick plate? And it didn’t cost much at all.