Make a Bathroom Vanity look like a Custom Piece of Furniture

Sheila at Plum Doodles turned her boring bathroom vanity into a Custom Piece of Furniture.  I love this so much I asked her to guest post and share her process.  It’s such a smart idea!  Here I was thinking I needed to tear out ALL my Bathroom Vanities and build new pieces to give them some custom character, when all I need to do is …  well, I’ll let Sheila explain.

Hello, all you Sawdust Girl fans! My name is Sheila and I blog over at Plum Doodles. If you enjoy this little project, I hope you’ll come on over and look around! I’m so thrilled that Sandra asked me to share my bathroom vanity makeover. We bought our home a little over 2 years ago and thought we had found a bargain. Unfortunately, home values have continued to fall in the Atlanta area. Rather than sink unnecessary money into renovations, we try to work with what we have as much as possible. For example, we kept our big ugly builder mirror and framed it. I wanted a furniture style vanity in our master bath, but didn’t like the prices. Here’s what we did to give our existing vanity a little furniture style.

First, I painted the toe kick- black to give the illusion of a shadow under a leggy furniture piece. Sorry, no pics of this step, pre-blogging days.

My next step to aid in the furniture illusion was to add legs to the cabinet. Because you hafta’ have legs on a leggy furniture-look vanity, right?

One of my favorite catalogs is from Van Dyke’s. They have a website, but I love thumbing through a catalog and turning down the corners on pages I want to remember. Yeah, pre-pinterest.

Anyway, I measured the height of the toe kick on our cabinet in each spot where I wanted a leg, then looked for legs that would be a little taller than the largest measurement. I also knew I needed the top section of the leg to be straight so that it could be easily cut down to the exact height needed. All 4 legs had to be cut to a little bit different height, primed and painted.

The cabinet stayed in this stage for several months until I decided on a design for the skirt sections. I first cut the design out of cardboard and adjusted as needed for each section. Then I used my rotozip to cut the pieces out of 3/4 inch mdf. I primed, then painted with the same semi-gloss latex enamel I used on the legs.

Richard screwed 1×2 cleats on the back of each piece in order to attach them to the vanity. (The cleats were shifted up slightly at each end as needed to account for my less than perfect cutting.)

Richard patiently holds up the process while I snap pictures.

Doodles,

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