Bathroom Vanity, Giving an old Buffet some love

The bathroom vanity in our master bathroom is actually a buffet my mom purchased when she first moved out when she was 19. Years later it ended up in a storage shed out here and then years after that I gave it a makeover! From there I converted it into a bathroom vanity for our master and totally love its deep storage, extra tall height and beautiful look. However, over the years, it now definitely needs some attention again!

Lodi and I both use essential oils in our daily routines. (Especially me as I use Jasmine essential oil as a perfume.) Unfortunately we haven’t always been as quick to wipe up any spills or drops over the last few years…

So essential oils have essentially (see what I did there?) burned right through the top coat of poly acrylic on our vanity.

Its not pretty!

With the full revamp I’ve been hacking away at of our entire second floor master suite I was determined to do absolutely everything on my “annoyed so long with” list.

So, not only will I be fixing the top which is a recent issue but I will also be tackling the biggest annoyance I’ve had with this vanity ever since I first installed it.

Because the floor is unlevel the vanity is leaned forward nearly two inches!

The gap between the wall and the vanity continuously swallows anything we accidentally knock its way.

To fix this I took all the drawers out and took off the S trap so the vanity is could be pulled out.

I used a small wood saw (I love this little guy) and simply cut an inch off each of the back legs.

Presto!

With that done it was time to tackle that poor top!

I knew to do this “right” I really need to uninstall the sink and bring this buffet down to my workshop and COMPLETELY sand the entire piece of furniture down to raw wood again so I could entirely refinish it.

First though I decided to see if I couldn’t get it done by hand with some fine grit sand paper.

I just needed to get through the vanity finish in the worst of the spotted places.

Fortunately for me it actually worked out. I stained over the top and was pretty much thrilled. You can still see the ghosts of the old stains from the essential oils but it is SO much better.

After that I did several thick coats of a semi gloss poly acrylic over the entire top.

Again, as I’ve said so many times here on the blog, acrylics are not ideal in these kinds of situations but I much prefer them to oils. They’re A LOT less toxic, they clean up with just water, they take a lot less time to dry and they hardly stink at all in comparison.

After that I slid the vanity back against the wall and reinstalled its trap. I also put a few screws into studs along the back of the vanity so it never moves again.

Huzzah! Almost NO GAP!

Also (because of essential oils again) our little corner stand that I made out of thrift store plates was just gross. Even after scrubbing it the yellow stains would not come out so I gave it a new coat of high gloss white rustoleum.