pour améliorer: Hunter Extraordinaire

Those of you that have been following this blog for a little while will know that Gumtree is like my Internet home away from home. I've bought more of the things in our house from that site than I can even count.

So, when I decided that I wanted to be special and find a piece of furniture for our downstairs bathroom vanity that could be painted like our fancy upstairs vanity cabinet, guess where I headed?

But unlike our upstairs cabinet, which we just happened to already own as a piece of furniture and which was almost exactly the right size to span one wall in our upstairs bathroom, the downstairs cabinet presented me with more problems. I searched for months and months and months.

See I wanted something along these kinds of lines.

Source

But of course I didn't want to pay the exorbitant price that that kind of vanity undoubtedly costs. So, Gumtree searching it was! Most 1-metre-wide (which was all the space we had to work with) dressers tend to be divided into two columns of drawers, with a central board running straight down the middle like this one (listed for $80), which first caught my eye because of its slightly fancy legs.

But since my bathroom vanity plan would involve waste plumbing needing to run straight down the middle of the cabinet underneath the bowl centred on top, that would mean some seriously complicated mucking around with the inner workings of the cabinet and all of the drawers.

So I narrowed my search to options where the plumbing would have a free run down the middle. I found this option listed for $100, and drove all the way across town to have a look at it, but it was a bit damaged, and the drawers didn't run smoothly, so I had to move on...

And found nothing for so long that I started considering other ways to accomplish my plan. I found these two bedside tables that I thought I could sit a little apart from each other with the sink bowl centred between them on a panel of glass. That would obviously mean that I'd need some fancy chrome plumbing rather than the ordinary plastic stuff, but I was getting a bit desperate.

Then they got snapped up by someone else, and I was back to the drawing board. I drove all the way to yet another side of town to have a look at this guy...

But he was a bit of a weird mix of real timber and plastic veneer, so I wasn't confident about painting him.

Until finally... FINALLY, I found this guy, and the long hunt was over!

I adore those fancy Queen Anne legs and the shape of the mirror on the back, and best of all, there are THREE columns of drawers, so we just need to cut out the back of the middle ones for the plumbing, and our problems are solved!

So I snapped him up for about $150, and then my furniture hunt became a spray-painter hunt. The car sprayer that originally sprayed our upstairs cabinet, dining table and bathtub was now apparently much busier than he was two years ago, so he wasn't interested in mucking around spraying timber furniture anymore.

So this was how the bathroom looked for quite a while.

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of my spray-painter search, and just cut to the good part. After getting quotes in excess of $1,000 from a couple of people that made me want to faint, I eventually found someone who quoted $350 to do it. And they collected it and delivered it back to me when it was done!!!

So then... we had this!

Isn't it gorgeous?!!!!!

There are still a few things we need to take care of... you can see in this shot that the top middle drawer is missing, because we need to shorten it in order to make room for the waste plumbing. And we also need to install drawer handles and paint and mount the mirror to the wall above.

The gloss black of the vanity works in beautifully with the gloss black brick tile on the opposite wall. Just how I wanted it! It was totally worth the pain.

So in terms of price, it still wasn't particularly cheap. At $150 for the original piece, $350 for the painting, about $100 for the ceramic bowl on top, and about $35 for new drawer handles we're looking at a total cost of $635. But we did also get the mirror included in the original price, which with a bit of gloss black spray paint will look fantastic above the vanity, so that's saved us at least $100 that we might otherwise have spent on a mirror.

And a quick Internet search just proved to me that a super boring ordinary vanity cabinet like this one still runs at nearly $600 anyway.