One of my favorite (best?) moves is to bring vintage into every room (obviously), but it’s harder to do in bathrooms aside from styling. I’m not sure if this idea was born out of desperation (I don’t have a vanity but I have this dresser, ok!) or if I had planned this from the beginning but I know this much – I intentionally didn’t get a readymade vanity in the hope of using something vintage. I love this English pine antique dresser so much (the keyholes) so when I was asked what our plan was for the vanity I thought, “Uh, would this work?” and we went for it.
We originally shot this dresser for the kids’ room reveal at the mountain house (four years ago?? and I’ve been hoarding it ever since (I intentionally moved it from there knowing that it would work so well in this house somewhere). But Jamie (ARCIFORM) had to do some magic on it to turn it into a vanity.
Now, very often when someone takes a vintage piece and turns it into a vanity they use a vessel sink on top – I think it’s just an easier application. I did this in my kids’/guest bath at our Glendale house:
This totally worked for this bathroom (more midcentury and graphic) but I not what I was going for in this farmhouse kids’ bath (also pretty darn sure that there wasn’t enough room between the vanity and the toilet per code – but we didn’t use permits on that old bathroom soooooo…).
Jamie had to measure and cut the hole for the sink, then I believe that he reinforced the underside with some wood to make sure it could handle the heavy sink. He secured it from the underside as well.
Of course, he would need to cut a hole in the back for the plumbing, like so…
Jamie did such an expert job at this – although I’m sure it could be DIY’d if you have some carpentry skills.
Wait, So Can You Still Put Storage In The Drawers?
You betcha! You lose all storage on the top drawer – it’s just a dummy drawer that houses the sink. The bottom drawer fully functions with lots of space. But the trick became the middle drawer.
Jamie hacked out space for the plumbing and built a frame into the drawer – thus preserving the storage space on each side.
It actually holds a lot now. The drawers are tall enough to put in more vertical things upright (like shampoo, conditioner, etc.). There’s even a decent amount of space in front of the cutout.
And then the bottom drawer fully functions, like it did before.
The Countertop
Now this dresser was on the narrower side. We knew for sure that we had to do a wall-mount faucet because we wouldn’t have the space for a deck mount. The first wall-mount faucet we chose came out much farther than this one – technically the water made it into the bowl, but it looked dumb. So I had an extra one of these (long story) and we changed them out which isn’t always as easy as it sounds, but worked in this case…thankfully!!
We drew out the backsplash to be this pretty shape and I just LOVE how it turned out.
There she is. Another vintage dresser turned vanity piece in the books and we LOVE IT. I’m sure we should seal the wood now that it’s in a bathroom which we haven’t done yet, but I also may never 🙂 Come back tomorrow for some bathroom styling (the tub niche curtains) then the full reveal on Monday! xx
*Pretty Photos by Kaitlin Green
THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED HERE.
