Guest Bathroom: Overhauling the Vanity

I'm so excited to share our first before and after for the bathroom rehaul!  However, I do have to apologize for being a bad blogger, since I seem to not have taken comprehensive pictures of the whole process.  Oops.

To refresh your memory, here's the vanity in place before we started.  I always hated how both the bathroom vanities in this house were so lowwww.  I felt like I had to bend completely at the waist to wash my face.  Granted, I'm kind of tall (although compared to some members of my family, I feel short at 5'8").  So when I saw Centsational Girl's post about adding legs to her bathroom vanity, I knew it was happening in our guest bathroom.

Mr. Great Indoors pulled the vanity out when he started the drywall work and plopped it into the hallway.  This is the best true "before" I've got for you.  I never got a really good picture of the base before we started.

To start, Mr. GI flipped the vanity over and took off the old base.  We looked at the furniture leg options at Lowe's but nothing really struck our fancy, so instead we bought a 2x2 board.  Mr. GI measured the height of our new pedestal sink and planned the feet to make the vanity as tall as the sink, which meant the feet needed to be 8 inches tall.  A combination of Gorilla Glue wood glue and nails (air compressors are awesome), and we had three new feet.  The reason we went with three feet instead of four is that we plan to anchor the vanity to the wall in the back.  So the front feet are there for looks/function and the back foot is there for function.

After letting the feet dry, we flipped it rightside up to get a look.  I wish I had gotten a picture of it, but at this point the vanity looked like it was up on stilts.  It needed something chunkier to look solid.  So after some brainstorming, we got a 0.5x4 plank to line the base of the vanity.  It forms a nice apron around the bottom.  Mr. GI set both planks back by about a half an inch to give the base some dimension.  He only put it on the two sides that would be visible after installation.

Here's a look straight on, while Mr. GI was taking out a better hole for the plumbing (there were three holes there at first, and we're planning on moving the vanity an inch or so away from the wall-- so by creating one hole instead of three we made it a little easier to accomplish that move).

And from the side that will stand next to the toilet.  Pretend that it's anchored to an imaginary wall.

Here's a look at the back/left side.

 

And the back/right side, which will be next to the bathroom wall.

If you were paying attention up there, you probably glimpsed the colors we were testing on the vanity, both finds in the Lowe's oops bin, which I mentioned here.

The light gray (Valspar, $1, can't remember the name) turned out to be waaaaay too light (you can barely see it on the vanity base in the second picture), but the dark gray (Olympic One, $2.50, guessing Knight's Armor) was perfect.  I tested it on the doors so I could walk it back into the bathroom and look at both colors against the existing fixtures, the vanity top, toilet, and shower.

Somehow I didn't get a picture of the base after the first coat (bad blogger, I know), but here are the doors after the first coat.  I was really impressed with how well the color covered; even after just the first coat, you could barely tell the vanity had started out white.  It definitely makes my mind up that we'll be using Olympic One (primer/paint in one) for the walls of the bathroom.  This particular paint was a satin sheen, which looks really good on the vanity and should be durable/scrubbable enough for use in the bathroom.

We painted the vanity in tag-team fashion, really whoever got to it first, but each section required two coats for complete coverage.  First was the top of the vanity, then flipped it over and painted the base and legs, then both front and back of the doors.

Despite my lack of process pictures, here it is ready to go!  The colors are a little strange; I really need to learn how to white balance my camera.  

Some side by side action for you.  And yes, we do plan to keep the vanity in front of the bike rack.  It really sets off the space, don't you think?  ;-)

Seriously, though, we can't wait to get this baby into the bathroom!  More to do first, though, so we'll have to hold our horses for now. 

I was really happy with Olympic One, but I definitely wasn't perked to write this post about it... obviously, since I grabbed it from the Oops bin at Lowe's.  I just hope my experience with it comes in handy for you!

Follow along with the rest of our bathroom adventures: our dream, the before, mildewwww, every day we're drywalling (what a terrible pun), the our thrifted finds so far, ripping out wallpaper, making up my mind on a wall color, plus my Pinterest boards for the guest bathroom and master bathroom.

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