Galaxy Nickel Mirror Molding Cabinets

GN MIRROR MOLDING is a length of profile finished on its faces and rabbeted along the back inner edge, which is to say there is a step cut into it that the edge of the glass sits into. Four pieces mitred at the corners make a frame; the rabbet holds the glass; the outside face is the finish. It is $87.75 on the live list.

Two jobs come out of that. The first is framing a mirror that is already on the wall — the frame is assembled around it in place, or assembled and dropped over it, and fixed to the wall rather than to the glass. The second is building a frame for a new mirror, in which case the glass is ordered to suit the frame instead of the other way round, and everything gets easier.

What it is not: a medicine cabinet, a mirror, or a kit. It is material by the length, and there is no hardware in the box. Whoever cuts it needs a mitre saw and somewhere flat to glue up.

Here is the mistake, and it is close to universal. Somebody measures the mirror — thirty inches by thirty-six, say — and orders enough moulding for a frame with those inside dimensions. The frame is then built to thirty by thirty-six as a daylight opening, the glass is offered up, and it will not go in, because the rabbet has to overlap the glass edge to hold it. The frame that fits a thirty-by-thirty-six mirror has an inside dimension slightly smaller than the glass on every side, and an outside dimension larger again by twice the profile width.

So work in three numbers, in this order, and the part will fit the first time.

1. Measure the glass itself, both dimensions, at both ends. Plate mirrors are cut by hand and are rarely square; use the largest number in each direction.
2. Subtract the rabbet overlap from each side to get the daylight opening — the visible aperture the frame leaves. This is the dimension the frame is actually built to.
3. Add twice the profile width to each glass dimension to get the outside size of the finished frame. That is the number to check against the wall, the light fixture above and the backsplash below, because it is the thing that has to physically fit the space.

Then the material: total stick length needed is the perimeter of the outside dimension, plus roughly eight inches per corner for the mitres, rounded up to whole sticks. A thirty-by-thirty-six mirror in a two-inch profile has an outside perimeter of around eleven feet before waste, which is more material than the small numbers in your head suggest.

The honest caveat: the live list publishes this as one part at one price and does not give the rabbet depth, the profile width or the stick length. Those three numbers are what the arithmetic above depends on. Ask us for them before ordering — it takes one message and it is the difference between one order and two.

The first column has one specific trap worth naming. Builder-grade mirrors are held by J-clips at the bottom and spring clips at the top, and those clips stand proud of the glass. A frame assembled around the mirror has to clear them or the clips have to come off first, which usually means somebody is holding a large sheet of glass against a wall. Decide which before the moulding is cut.

A framed mirror puts the cabinet finish at eye level, eighteen inches above the vanity, directly under whatever fixture is over it — and bathroom fixtures are the warmest lights in most houses, frequently 2700K and frequently very close to the surface. A mid-tone grey under a very warm light at close range loses a little of its crispness and can read slightly dull, where the same finish on the vanity doors three feet lower, catching daylight from the door, does not.

This is not an argument against the frame. It is an argument for looking at a sample on the wall, in that position, with the fixture on, before ordering — and for choosing a cooler lamp if the bathroom is being relamped anyway. The gray shade guide covers how much lighting moves a mid-tone, and a door sample held where the frame will go answers it in a minute.

The proximity point cuts the other way too, and in your favour. A frame and a vanity door are the two pieces of this finish that a person will ever see closest together at the same eye height, which makes the match more convincing than anything achievable in a kitchen, where the nearest comparison is a wall cabinet six feet from a base one.

The mirror is wider than about sixty inches. A long mitred frame in an applied profile will move with the bathroom’s humidity, and the corners are where that shows. Above that width a mirror with its own integral frame, or a pair of mirrors over a double vanity, is the sounder answer.

There is a medicine cabinet. A surface-mounted cabinet has its own door and edge and does not want framing; a recessed one wants a trim that suits the wall, not the vanity.

The bathroom is deliberately contemporary. A frameless mirror with a polished edge is the current default for a reason, and a traditional framed mirror over a flat-fronted vanity can look like it came from a different project. This is a taste call rather than a technical one, but it is worth making consciously — the vanity buying guide has both versions.

Everything on this page is priced on the mirror moulding page, and the vanity accessories list carries the rest of what goes around a bathroom run in the same finish.