To DIY or Not to DIY

According to our bathroom plan, we are going to be converting this buffet into a vanity (sorry about the bad zoomed-in photo).



It will sit in front of a feature wall tiled in this tile:


Naturally, I therefore decided that it must be painted a glossy black to blend in with the black pinstripe tiled wall. Wouldn't that just be amazing? Particularly with shiny chrome handles on all of the drawers and doors?

Something like this, but less leggy:

eclectic bathroom design

Well now that our existing bathroom is not exactly what you'd call safe (see here for that story), we've had to fast track the bathroom renovation a bit. The vanity unit itself is not absolutely essential for us to be able to use the room, but it would be nice to have it in place so that all of the tiling can be worked around it, and it eliminates the likelihood of mis-measuring or not positioning the plumbing and things correctly if we have most of the elements ready in the room.

So, I took a little trip to Bunnings last night to establish exactly what I need to do to turn the buffet into the spectacular show-stopping piece of furniture it is in my mind. The staff were very encouraging, and I walked away with a little pot of primer, a foam roller, and the only can of cheap glossy black spray paint that they had left on their shelves (looks like it was a popular day for buying gloss black spray paint).

Tom was popping off to a different Bunnings today, so I asked him to collect a few more spray cans since this job is going to take a fair bit of paint! While he was there, one of the staff asked him what he was planning to do with it, and recommended instead that we send the buffet off to a panel-beating person who could prep it and spray paint it with a 2pac finish that would never chip and be absolutely perfect for a price of about $300.


Hmm.

That's a fair wad of cash when compared to the $80 max it will cost us for the materials to do it ourselves, but the finish would be ten times better, I imagine.

And the vanity itself hasn't technically cost us anything (for this use at least), since we already own it (and don't have room for it in the house as an ordinary piece of furniture).

Plus there's that extra concern related to the fact that it's made of wood, so unless we put something protective on the top of it to create an extra special water barrier (I was actually thinking a mirror) we risk damaging it by using it in the bathroom. The 2pac finish would solve that problem since it would really seal it and no moisture could get through.

Hmm.

On the flipside, it means I don't get to DIY it, and I was really looking forward to creating it myself!

Hmm.

I could probably console my DIY craving by doing what I was going to do with the vanity to my new dining table...

What to do... what to do...