In a perfect world I’d love to reconfigure the bathroom.  It’s a pretty good size bathroom, but the layout doesn’t make the best use of the space.  Sure it would be fabulous if I could rotate the tub so the plumbing connections are against the wall, and swap the toilet and vanity around so I could fit in a sink with actual counter space… but rerouting plumbing is pricey and probably not going to happen.  This means I have to work with what I have, which happens to be enough room for a 24″ vanity. Sigh.

It gets even better though. The plumbing for our sink comes up through the floor instead of through the wall so anything raised on legs is out as well.  I also had to wave goodbye to a practically perfect option because the drawers were a 1/4″ too wide to accommodate our existing plumbing. That was devastation right there. I found another practically perfect option, but not only was it raised (I could work around that if I had too) but it was nearly all sink and no counter.  No bueno.

There was only one option left at this point.  Custom.  Not 100% from scratch kind of custom, but a custom mod to a mediocre cabinet.

I ended up with this as my base for several reasons. 1) I liked the counter top on it.  Too many had goofy recesses (mini soap dish? really?) and backsplashes that were unnecessary.  I wanted a white, streamlined sink and didn’t want to shell out another several hundred bucks to replace it in the future.  2) I liked the overall shape–simple and reasonably classic.  3) Price point was good.  I almost picked out a boring-as-hell builder-grade yawn-fest that was cheaper and the only reason I paid more was to get the counter/sink I liked more.

We also picked up this lovely little faucet.  I am absolutely crazy about the ceramic X shaped knobs.  I really wanted a wide-spread faucet with 3 separate pieces instead of everything mounted on a base, but that was over 3x the price so I had to pass on absolute perfection. This one is pretty near perfect though and so I think I can live with that.

Next up we ripped out the old vanity/sink.  In the process we discovered the shut-off valves were not completely shutting off the water so we had to turn off the water to the house, cut the pipes, install new compression fittings and shut-offs, turn the water back on, and pray we go it right.  We did.

The line of black on the wall is some rubbery adhesive I had to scrap off with a putty knife and razor blade.  And that wood pattern on the floor? Vinyl. Thank god they covered that up is all I can say! Then we measured where all the pipes were and cut holes into the base of our new vanity cabinet.

Luckily the sink did not come attached to the cabinet (which would have been good to know before we hauled the whole box up the stairs) so it was easy for one person to lift and the other to make sure everything was lining up right.  We also discovered this cabinet was  deeper than our old one (measure people!) and had to rip off the baseboard on the side wall (it will be going back once we trim it down).

The sink itself just attached with some silicone caulk so that was pretty simple.

Getting the faucet in was another story… Actually the faucet was easy, the pop-up assembly was the hard part.  If you’re just switching out a faucet you may not even need to deal with the pop-up assembly (drain stopper) but if you’ve added a brand new sink you’ll definitely have to.  The instructions that came with ours were AWFUL.  Part of the reason we were confused was that the part that came with our faucet was designed for a sink with an overflow, but our sink didn’t have that. We got it all sorted out eventually though.

So we’ve got the vanity cabinet in place.  We’ve got the sink installed.  We’ve got the faucet installed.  Go us!  Me being me, this wasn’t good enough, so then I painted the vanity.  The existing color wasn’t bad, but there were going to be some additions made and I didn’t want to stress over getting an exact finish match.

I wish I could tell you the color I used, but I can’t.  I started out with Benjamin Moore Temptation (Advance, satin) and thought it was too light, so I brought it back to get it re-tinted.  The next shade darker was French Beret and the awesome paint people couldn’t quite get that because of the amount of white in the previous mix so the color is somewhere in between the too, but still probably closest to Temptation (you can see the difference where I tried the dark version on the doors, although you can barely tell in real life).

Looking pretty good, right?  Not even the vanity is done yet though…