It’s here at last — the great big medicine cabinet of my dreams.
It’s big, big, big — a full 36 inches wide and 36 inches tall. Inside its lovely mirrored doors are ten, count ’em ten, shelves. Some tall. Some short. Some just right.
I have been dreaming of this medicine cabinet ever since Jon and I moved into this house back in 1978. For decades, we made do with a few vanity drawers and one deep, dark, very awkward cupboard built in at the foot of the bathtub.
It’s a common interior design trick — build a closet to fill the narrow space between the foot of the tub and the bathroom wall. The result, inevitably, is a cupboard nightmare — too deep and too dark to be of much use.
Our particular nightmare is thirteen inches wide and a full twenty-eight inches deep.
The first few inches of that cupboard have been accessible and useful. The spaces behind those first few inches, however, have been worse than useless.
Unbeknownst to Jon and me, those spaces collected a lot of weird stuff over the years. An army of of half-empty hydrogen peroxide bottles, expired. A otoscope for looking into kids’ ears. A travel clothesline. A urinal. A snake bite kit.
But now at last I can empty out that very narrow, very deep cupboard of ours and throw things away.
What I don’t throw away, I will put in my brand-new, great big medicine cabinet where the shelves are 3 1/2 inches deep — and provide a full fifteen linear feet of visible, useful, no-nonsense storage space.
Accountability will prevail: expired peroxide will get tossed. Bandaids will not get lost behind cough medicine. Toothpaste will not be buried under cotton balls.
And the snake bite kit? It will be right there where I can find it the next time I bump into a rattlesnake.
