Furniture You Can Use As a Vanity

One of the great things about owning a home is that you can make it your own.

The bathroom is an obvious place to start. A bathroom is the place where you usually start your day, as you get ready to go to work or play. As such, it should be a comfortable space that exudes beauty and functionality.

While you could make do with your existing vanity, you can opt to do a small remodeling project that really makes your bathroom pop. As you’ve probably noticed, vanities available at home improvement stores are usually pretty bland. If you look at custom vanities, they can be prohibitively expensive.

However, you can choose instead to use furniture as a vanity. You’ve probably seen the look before, either in your friend’s homes or in the pages of home and garden magazines. By converting a piece of furniture, you can have a beautiful new vanity with very little work.

The furniture you can use as a vanity includes any piece that is the right height for a sink. This can include a dresser, chest of drawers, lowboy or desk. The piece of furniture only needs to have a top big enough to hold a sink, or two if you want to do a his and hers bathroom remodel.

Using a piece of furniture for the vanity has several advantages. First, you can create a unique look that appears to be custom, but isn’t. You can also match the décor of your master bedroom or any other room, using a piece of furniture that just didn’t quite fit there to create a matching piece in the bathroom.

Before you get too far, you want to measure the space you have. You have two options in this regard. You can hunt for a piece of furniture that fits the space or opt to go with a smaller piece that doesn’t go wall to wall. If you’re putting in two sinks, you can also choose to go this route, creating two standalone vanities. You will, however, lose a bit of counter space.

Once you have the ideal piece of furniture you can use as a vanity, you want to modify it. This includes cutting holes in the back to accept the water lines and drain and cutting a hole on the top for the sink. As you do this, be sure to consider how each will affect the drawers. If you’ve selected a dresser or desk because it had drawers or a cabinet for storing bathroom wares, nothing’s more maddening than finding out that the sink you’ve selected and the plumbing makes them all useless.

If you want to maximize the drawer space, consider a sink that sits on the top rather than sits flush in it. There are lots of these types of sinks on the market today and they can make a beautiful vanity when combined with the right piece of base furniture.

Another thing to consider when choosing the right piece of furniture is its height. If the dresser or desk is too low, you can always add a base to it to bring it up higher. It’s far easier to raise a low piece than lower a tall piece. Ideally you want to limit your choices of furniture to those that can be adjusted to the optimal height of 30″ above the floor. There is some leeway with this standard, but remember that if you set it higher or lower because you’re either tall or short, it could become an issue when you try to sell the house. It’s best to stick with the standards.

A vanity can be a major expense in today’s homes. By using a piece of used, antique or surplus furniture, you can make a dramatic statement while saving some money on putting in a new vanity. This can give you additional leeway in your budget to purchase that really cool vessel-style sink that you’ve always coveted.