#24 - It Was You All Along / You Had Me At Hello / Lookin' For Love In All The Wrong Places
Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down and I'd like to take a minute just sit right there I'll tell you how . . .
. . . we almost died again while buying a bathroom vanity on the cheap-o.
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| The Vanity Alcove |
Remember my dreams of a Spanish bathroom retreat?
The side of my brain speaking in suave flowing Spanish communicates with the bossy side of my brain which speaks Practicality, and it's not always a smooth conversation.
In searching for bathroom elements, there were two driving forces:
1) The color and finish of the vanity
2) The color scheme of the tile
And they both have to work in harmony. We bought a white vanity for upstairs and we have a white vanity in our hall bath in our original house. I love white, but I was hoping to find a nice wooden vanity to warm things up and bring in a natural element and texture. I told you about the vanity that was my first love from Pottery Barn. Thankfully, in the dating world my first love worked out for me and I've been married to him for 14 years. In vanity shopping, it was a crash and burn and it has been a very rocky rocky road. I've fallen in and out of love more times than is healthy.
I couldn't shake the love I have for that finish, color and texture of that Pottery Barn vanity. There are zillions of brown vanities at the big box stores, but it's the actual wood grain that I really love. But every time I found one I loved, it was in the multiple thousand dollar range. We can't justify that. I don't need wood grain that much. I take that back, I do need wood grain that much, but we also need to put siding on our house and whatnot so I can't say yes to multi-thousand dollar wood grain if I want the rest of our house to be finished. And I do.
Simultaneously, I was shopping for tile. OH, THE BEAUTIFUL TILES. That COST $30/sqft. Agh! Before we even started this project, I found this tile and fell in love; and it has forever been the unreachable standard for all other tiles.
I also had this in mind from the get-go, but when I first started shopping it was much more expensive and much less popular. I knocked it out of the running because of the price early on, but now I've kept it out of the running because I found that as much as I love this, I want something a little less mainstream and I've been liking patterned tile better anyway.
I have searched hours and hours and hours online and in stores for vanities and tiles that meet our standards. I want pretty things, Matt wants me to have pretty things so I won't be grumpy and we both want to have finishes that don't need any babysitting or special maintenance. The very first thing I said to Matt when this all started was, "The one thing I really, really want more than anything else is a pretty tile in the master bathroom!" I love marble and other natural stone, but I know that, on a floor, I am not going to babysit it and give it the special love and care it deserves. I'm just not gifted in that area. If it's not going to do my laundry, change my sheets, come visit me and pluck my chin hairs when I'm 96, I am not going to give it extra TLC when I'm 36. (I currently have the same feelings about hamsters, dogs and cats. Though, I think I'm 1-3 years away from asking for a puppy. Weird things happen when your kids grow up and you still want something small and warm to care for. Talk me out of it.)
One final monkey wrench that disrupted the vanity/tile decision process is that we built a vanity alcove to fit a 60 inch vanity (I think it's a 60.75" opening to account for whatever needs to be accounted for in a built-in 60" vanity) Our new master bath is 100% based off of how much we love our current master bath. The sink and shower areas are the exact size of what we currently have because it works for us.
The problem we ran into is that the majority of vanities available right now are free standing. There aren't many off the shelf wall-to-wall vanity options even in standard sizes. And the freestanding vanities often have decorative trim on either size. These will fit into the space, but would not be ideal. There would be weird gaps and spaces that would just look a little off. A lot of options also all have legs and sit up off the ground. Which is very, very stylish and looks really, really nice. However, do you know how wonderful it is to have an area of the house that doesn't have a floor that needs to be cleaned? If you buy a vanity that goes all the way to the ground and has a kick plate, no dirt can get under it. And then you don't have to clean there. I like places where dirt cannot go and that I can ignore for the rest of my life. I do not want to spend my life cleaning hairballs and dust bunnies out from underneath my bathroom vanity. I feel the same way about the beautiful vanities that have open shelving. They look pretty in the magazines, but my goodness, in a bathroom there's a lot of steam, hair, hairspray and lint flying around and landing on those shelves and baskets and sticking like glue! It's just not my thing.
So - in summary, I was shopping for something pretty, preferably real wood or at least a good fake, nothing freestanding or with legs or open shelves, and not bigger than 60" and not much smaller than 60". AND hopefully $1000 or less when all said and done including the counter top! It was not an easy process!
And the vanity search was happening while simultaneously shopping for tile that has a little bit of a Spanish/European/Moroccan flair, will match nicely with a woodish color vanity (if I could find one, but if I couldn't, I'd have to go black, white or grey which could change the color choice of the tile.) and is under $5 a square foot including grout and other supplies it takes to tile a bathroom floor.
At one point, I gave up hope that we would find a vanity and just picked the closest brownish colored one at Lowe's and wanted to get it. Thankfully, Matt didn't like the way the drawers closed so we didn't buy it. I'm glad because I would regret it now. It was a decision almost made in hopelessness and desperation. It would've been settling.
(This sounds so very emotional and dramatic. I truly only spent about 5% of my life pondering vanities. As I write this all out it seems very major, but I promise it's just a blip on the radar. There's a lot of stuff that goes on in my brain at one time, and this is just a very very small portion.)
We kept hitting brick walls. Found so many vanities that were just not right for one reason or another. If they were perfect, they were $1,500-$3,000. If they were priced right, they were cheaply made. There was one that was the one but it was 59 inches instead of 60! And no amount of rigging with trim and filler pieces and whatever would have made it look right in the 60.75" space. Well, it could have I guess, but it would've taken a lot of time and effort and we already have to spend a lot of time and effort on other elements of this big project! Isn't it pretty though?
And then I found the most gorgeous vanity I have ever seen ... on ebay!
I am NOT an ornate person. I would normally hate this. But there is just something about this vanity that calls my name. The proportions maybe? I think it's that it's ornate but still has straight lines. I have no idea, but I fell hard for this one. But everything about it is SO WRONG for us. The curvy sides are no good, the dimensions are bad, the price is a tad too high, the curved edge on the counter top does not work in our favor. But I almost threw all caution to the wind and lied to myself and pretended that it was perfect because I really wanted it. (Insert all life applications here that match this exact scenario.) It wouldn't have been a good choice, but can someone else please buy it so I can come visit it? (I wouldn't have used a busy tile with it. I would've let the vanity do the talking and the tile and walls would take a backseat.)
It's still hard to look at it and not have it. I'll have to block that page.
At that point, I removed real wood grain from my mind and started looking at black, white and grey also and I found this one and was ready to pull the trigger, but somehow I did not notice that it doesn't have straight sides! See where it flairs out? That does not work in an alcove! Also, it has feet, but by this point we figured we'd have to compromise and be slaves to hairballs for ever. That's fine. I liked the charcoal color though, and the nice detailing on the front.
Hind sight is 20/20. Had we known an alcove vanity is such a pain in the neck, we would have probably built the bathroom differently. We started looking at custom vanities - but those rang in at $2,000 or more and fit just fine but were basic and didn't have much charm or character (I was ruined by that ebay option.) Who wants to spend $2,000 on something just because it fits, but it doesn't even have any character? I would rather rig up a pretty $1300 vanity than to buy a custom one for $700+ more.
Of course, by then we were toying with the idea of Matt building one. The sides don't matter at all, only the front will show and he's very capable of doing that kind of thing. However, that took us back to the problem of having 70 million OTHER things to do. And we just wanted to buy something ready-to-go that we can just stick where it needs live and be done with it.
Way back in the beginning of this project, my aunt and cousins informed me of a local guy that sells things on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. He also has a website that he keeps mostly up to date with what he has available. Back in the summer, I checked out his site and there was this one vanity that kept catching my eye. It was everything that I don't really love. No wood grain. I don't really enjoy a bright burnt orange/brown tint on things (cinnamon is what this is called). It's just not my color (I know, it doesn't line up with my deep love of the brown/orange ebay vanity. But, nothing about loving that ebay vanity makes sense.). I liked the shape of it, and I like the warmth of the color. But, I hadn't even started shopping for anything yet and this wasn't anything at all like the picture in my head. I didn't even consider it because certainly there would be better options out in the big-big world.
Certainly not. Lots of time searching left us vanity-less. There were plenty of options, but not one of them worked perfectly. We ultimately decided that it would be best to find a vanity size and shape that we liked and would work, but that we would be willing to paint if necessary (since we found that charcoal one above at Menards.)
So, I emailed this guy shortly after Christmas and asked if we could come see another vanity he had listed. It was an antique green, but we planned to paint it. It was listed at $395...
We set up a meeting, knowing it would be at a warehouse. What we didn't expect was that it would be dark and freezing and packed full with stacks and stacks of boxes. You could tell they had an organization system going on and knew exactly where things were (think someone's garage 1000x bigger than an average garage.) The prices are great and the amount of goods they have is crazy.
I asked to see the green vanity and he informed us that all of his other vanities were in a certain area, but this Mr. Antique Green one was buried in a side room. Uh oh. He mentioned this to us and said he had other vanities that we could look at while we were there too. So, I said, "Actually, yeah. There's a cinnamon one I've seen on your website, I'd like to see that in person." So we went to see Mr. Cinnamon first. It was very nice, it had a kickplate, straight sides, some character, and as we were
But I still wanted to see Mr. Antique Green--wherever he was.
It turns out, it was in about 12 layers deep of boxes that you get to after walking a narrow pathway through other boxes. They had just gotten a shipment that week and there were so many items that we (the seller, Matt, me, the 3 kids!) had to walk in a single file line about 15 feet into a pile of things, hold 3 other boxes out of the way to peek into the box using our phone flashlights to see just a small corner of this vanity. It would have taken about an hour to dig this guy out of where he was.
Decision made! I like Antique Green but I liked Cinnamon better. And you'd better believe that the location of the vanity had a lot to do with that decision! Just because I don't want my family to die by getting buried in a warehouse full of boxes doesn't mean that we won't die that way. Accidents happen and I definitely didn't feel this was A Safety First Situation. We would have had to help get that green vanity out of where it was, and the single file pathway to get to it was so long and narrow that I would have taken at least an hour or more to get it out. Only to paint it? When Mr. Cinnamon was happily out in the (comparatively) wide open and $190! And if we didn't get buried to our deaths, we would have frozen to death. I don't really know how it's ok to have a warehouse that full, but we're not asking any questions. I like the prices, so we'll go buy the toilets and vanity tops there and mums the word!
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| I still really like that color. I think charcoal will look better with the tile, but it's a tough call. |
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| The blemish that took it to $190 |
So, we purchased Mr. Cinnamon. Told the kids, "See, kids, this is how you find good deals." And the seller informed us that he was quite relieved we didn't want the green one! No surprise there!
Since we concluded ahead of time that we would buy one and paint it (which I can do myself, so Matt is freed up for the smarty-pants technical things like creating hydroponic heating system controller units) our tile could be purchased. Matt actually came across this tile at Home Depot. I found it for $1.29/ sqft elsewhere and only after buying it and bringing it home did I realize that I have a screen shot of this exact tile on my phone from June 20th!
That'll teach me to shop around. When you see what you think will work and it catches your eye...save yourself the trouble and headache and just get it. Cinnamon vanity and blue and white tile. They were the ones all along. And that's that.
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| 500 lbs. of tile and a sneak peek of our doors! |
I had so many different scenarios worked out in my head! I even considered buying handpainted Mexican 4x4 tiles at around $1-$4 a piece to use as a backsplash because that would take far less square footage than doing an entire floor (and therefore less dinero) and going neutral on the floor! But, I'm glad I stuck to my original desire to have fun, unique, pretty tile on the floor. I guess it's not super Spanish-Spanish, but it has enough European/oldworld/Spanish flair that I know I'll love it for a long time. When my kids come to do my laundry and pluck my chin hairs when I'm 96 and say, "Gosh, Mom, your great-granddaughter really would love to get her hands on your place and update it for 2078." I'll say, "no en tu vida! Gracias pero no gracias. Go decorate your own house and leave me with my pretty tile."
Keep your (hairfree) chins up & smiles wide friends!
Happy weekend! I'm going to take a bunch of pictures this weekend and do a big update on how everything's looking right now. I'll tell you how it's feeling though -- like an enormous walk-in fridge!!
Stay warm!
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