Updating A Bathroom Vanity

Updating A Bathroom Vanity by Becky

Hi, I’m Becky from Goodbye Faux Wood Paneling. My husband and I just recently started our blog in January and I was pretty sure our only reader was my mother so I was shocked when Cassity asked me to share our bathroom vanity project with all the fellow Remodelaholics and I’m really excited to share this guest post today! I’m a full-time working mother and have somewhat of an addiction to DIY design blogs. Since the handy hubby and I are always tackling projects in our own home on the cheap I figured it was finally time to start sharing some of them for others to draw some knowledge and inspiration from. Besides, I figured, even if we never have any blog followers at least we’ll have a chronicle of our home before and afters for our own sake.

The bathroom updating started pretty innocently, in fact it started with cleaning the tile floor. The cleaning went wrong when some grout got scrubbed out of the tile joints and then things snow balled from there. Once the grout project was complete the vanity seemed somewhat tired (read really really dated, and more suitable for cabin/RV use, than a "modern" bathroom"). Brace yourselves because here’s the horrendous before picture.



We decided to redo the bathroom vanity for three reasons; 1) it was tired 2)it would be good practice making cabinet doors for the project that never ends and 3) the floor tile doesn’t extend under the vanity so replacing it would have been difficult.

We used MDF for the panels and paint grade wood (poplar) for the door frames because it’s cheap, easy to handle in our makeshift wood shop (aka garage), and accepts heavy black paint just fine. For the doors, we really liked to the look of a beaded inset door and picked up a rail and stile bit set for our router table that we can use on other projects.

These bits are not cheap but we have a lot of cabinet doors to update throughout the house, so we bought one we liked and will save a ton going the DIY route versus buying new cabinets or having the doors custom made by someone else. After few practice runs and lots of fine tuning of the bit depth to get the doors to look just right we were pretty pleased with the results.



We put an applied bead on the face frames of the cabinet to dress up the existing face frame a bit as well as a piece of modified base board trim to add a “furniture-like” detail to the toe kick on our otherwise pretty basic cabinet. The whole cabinet received multiple coats of grey primer and glossy black latex paint as well as some classy brushed nickel hardware to top it off. Here it is all shiny and new looking.



As far lessons learned, the old standby "take your time" really reared its ugly head on this one, we got impatient to get it completed and that caused some naggling little problems such as brush marks, inconsistent reveals between the doors and door frame and slightly off kilter knobs. Thankfully, those things are really only noticed by us, and all in, we are really proud of our final results. If you’d like more a more detailed play-by-play how-to please click on over to our blog post.