sam's bathroom makeover

After buying our house back in March of 2017, we decided we wanted to do a budget upgrade to our downstairs bathroom. It had builders grade vanities and features and we did not want to replace the vanity because the wood floors in our house did not go under it. But, it was badly cracked in the porcelain near the faucet and starting to mold where it was cracked. We decided the best, budget friendly way to go about this was by cementing the vanity top. Pinterest gave us the idea for this and Zach thought it would be pretty easy to do, turns out it was!

Let me preface these pictures by saying it is almost impossible to get good pictures of a tiny powder room / bathroom like this. I'll start with the after pics and then go through the process.

We are eventually going to build shelves above the toilet here for storage.

Here's what we did:

Step 1: Remove everything

Step 2: Mix cement and literally paint onto the vanity top

Below is when it started to dry and we panicked that it would not look good.

So we did two more coats:

And did a poly finish in semi-gloss.

Step 3: Use our remaining Rustoleum Cabinet Painting Kit from the kitchen to do the vanity in white.

We broke this out into several weekends to separate the work. And by WE I mean only Zach, I did absolutely none of the work and just the design.

Step 4: Next Zach bought plywood and cut it into the perfect size pieces to use for shiplap. If he would have bought actual tongue and groove shiplap it would have been around $13 a sq foot and this entire wall was $40 with plywood. He spaced them out, painted the cracks, and went back to paint the whole thing.

Step 5: Change out all hardware to oil rubbed bronze, replace light fixture and faucet! I bought all the art from Desenio and framed it in these Ikea frames. I'm obsessed with the leather strap I got to hold the hand towel. The turkish hand towel is from Amazon here.

My favorite before and after. The before is from the day I went to tour the house with Zach.

Almost After: We are missing the hardware here but the angles are the same.

I would say total investment for this project was less than $500. Cement was cheap but the artwork, the hardware, and the lighting and mirror all added up. We replaced all the hardware on the vanity, the toilet handle, the toilet paper holder, and the sink itself as well as some pipes. Still way cheaper than spending $800 on a vanity alone.