Vanity Revamp

So I don't know about you, but the bathroom is the main thing I always make sure is super clean when we have people over. As strange as it sounds, I feel like you can tell a lot from a person's bathroom and how they keep it. Anyway, our bathroom was in need of a pick me up. We retiled it about 5 years ago and it's still in good shape (though we've always wished that we had gotten lighter tiles) but it definitely needed something to lighten it up a bit. I came up with the very simple idea of updating our vanity by adding panelling and painting it white. See how I transformed our vanity...

So this is what our vanity looked like before (excuse the toilet in the shot, I forgot to take proper before pics)

Not terrible, but not great either. We originally bought it from ebay and it was actually just an old wooden cupboard. Jeremy cut a hole in the top and removed the back so the sink and pipes would fit, then he painted it a cream colour. The problem was that EVERYTHING in our bathroom is cream/tan. Very boring and lacking in colour. Now because we wanted to add a bit more colour to the room, we thought we'd try painting the vanity grey/blue. I started to paint the vanity grey/blue and got about halfway done when we realised it just didn't work. If our tiles were white it would have looked great but with tan tiles it does not work. Big fail. After that we decided to just stick with white (semi-gloss), it wouldn't add any colour to the room but it would at least brighten it up. So I got to work covering all that grey/blue paint which took way too long! 

To add the panelling, I got a sheet of 3mm thick plywood from Bunnings and had them cut it for me into 5 panel pieces that would fit into the little recess on the front of the vanity door. Once we were home, I was looking forward to getting started right away, but quickly realised that the length of the pieces were too long, so we had to very carefully cut them down more and sand the edges. Once the panel pieces were the right measurements, I painted all of the edges before putting them on the vanity, as it wood be too difficult to paint between the panels once on the door. We also wanted to have the panelling really feature, so I needed to make sure I didn't actually paint between each panel once on the door. 

After painting the edges of the panel pieces, I used liquid nails to secure each panel piece to the vanity door. I made sure to apply pressure to each panel piece before adding the next one.

Here's what it looked like after all the panel pieces were added.

Once the liquid nails had dried, I finished painting the vanity white. 

Once the paint was dry I added a oval polished chrome knob, which is more in keeping with the rest of the bathroom hardware. 

So here is the before and after

It's like a new vanity but without the cost. I think for the paint, wood and knob, it cost us about $30 to update it. I also white washed the bathroom mirror and the whole room is now brighter. I'm debating painting the wall above all the tiles a shade of blue to match our bath towels, but I'm always a bit nervous about picking the right colour. Next reno on the list is our apartment floors. We may tackle the floors ourselves but no idea when we'll have time to do them! Until then...

Happy Renovating!