Hey! Did you hear? We are re-doing our bathroom.
The tale of three vanities begins:
One major component of the bathroom of course if the vanity/sink situation. I have been really set on finding an antique piece of furniture that would serve as a vanity once fixed up. I have scoured the web, been to plenty of antique stores, and racked my brain trying to figure out how I could get what I wanted. I wanted a piece of furniture with some style and personality all for a good price.
I think it’s important to clarify that it’s not only that I didn’t want to spend $500+ on a vanity (which is apparently on the low-end for the prices of vanities these days – go ahead throw up if you need to)… it’s that nothing on any of the website was speaking to me. Maybe if the prices were lower they would speak to me, or maybe if they weren’t so same looking they would speak to me. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I could get a vanity I wanted for the price I wanted.
We found this vanity on “bulk trash” day.
Someone was throwing out a perfectly good vanity with top so, we picked it up and brought it home. At first we were going to refinish/paint it, cut it down to size, etc… but LONNNNG story short it is too big. It’s 48″ wide and our space will fit a 36″ (max) vanity.
After visiting a bunch of antique stores I found one more Antique store that had multiple vendor stalls (so a lot of options) and I decided that we would check it out and if we didn’t find anything we would forget the antique option and buy something new. I didn’t want to give up it was just reallly frustrating to pick through gazillions of antiques and find nothing.
The place is called The Scranberry Coop (they have a blog too) and it’s in Andover NJ. It took us about an hour to get there so I was hoping we had not wasted our time. It’s turns out it is very similar to all the other antique shops and has a ton of junk to look at. Hubby spotted a small antique washstand underneath some creepy dolls and it was perfect! It was cute, and had great detail, and we thought we could work with the size. We had the shop manager remove it from beneath the creepy dolls, bought it for $75 and stuffed it in Ruby Ravioli for the ride home.
Once home we let the kit-cats inspect it to make sure it was suitable.
They helped us measure a bit more.
We all decided that it needed to be placed on some sort of riser (alteration #1) to give it the proper counter height and that we would remove the “harp” (alteration #2). We ate some lunch and then went to Home Depot and Loew’s to find some wood, and get ides for the vessel sink or regular sink we would add to the top. We quickly noticed that all of the sink were at least 18″ deep and our beautiful washstand was only 16″ deep. We thought okay maybe we can add to the back of the washstand also (alteration #3).
We weren’t convinced that Home Depot had all there was to offer so we headed to Loew’s and determined that vessel sinks are waaaayyy expensive and self rimming sinks were too big. We were feeling quite dejected. I thought it was best to go home and clear out our brains before Hubby got really grumpy so I convinced him we should just take a break go home and figure it out later.
On our way out we walked past the clearance plumbing aisle, as we always do these days, and low and behold……. a vanity! A “sierra” colored wooden 36″ vanity right there in the middle of the aisle. Now, Hubby was dilly-dallying and so I had to call over to him to get his butt over there. He came over beside me and we both looked at each other and
This evil clearance vanity was $100 — brand new, nothing wrong with it (maybe someone returned it) vanity for $100 – Originally $348.
We brought it home for inspection.
I think we said “Okay fine” to each other because we realized that all of the alterations needed for the antique vanity were quickly mounting and trying to make something out of something old was going to be really difficult. I guess this vanity spoke to us because it was going to be much easier, and maybe less expensive in the long run to buy and use this vanity.
Hubby tried out the “comfort height” of it. He is “washing” his hands.
We felt a little despondent because our high hopes had fallen so far. Although we both still hope to use the antique washstand for the Master Bedroom bath which will someday be made (right now it is a walk in closet space).
We tried to be green, frugal and unique. We ended up being slightly green, frugal, and not so unique (but still nice looking).