Under $50 Bathroom Vanity Update

Aside from the pretty wallpaper I put up a couple of months ago, this room was a blank slate.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to do in here for a long time and have mostly felt very stumped. I’ve been dreaming of swapping out the large wall mirror for something that will make more of a statement and maybe even adding tile, but those are both bigger projects that I don’t want to tackle until I have a better idea of what I want for this room.

So baby steps it is. The goal for this project was to of course, spend less than $50 and finish it in a week, but also to set the tone for the feeling I want in this bathroom. Step one for this project was looking at my saved inspiration images and figuring out what I was drawn to for each image.

After looking at those images together, I can safely say that I have a thing for dark shaker style cabinets. And a pop of wood, but that might have to wait for Phase 2 of this bathroom project. My plan for this mini bathroom makeover was to transform my simple slab vanity into a shaker style and give it a moody coat of paint.

We used 1/8” tempered hardboard cut down to 2” width for our trim pieces and then glued them up with liquid nails. We held each trim piece up with clamps for about 20 minutes to allow for the glue to dry before moving on to the next piece.

After gluing up all of the pieces, I lightly sanded the edges of the trim pieces and got painting! I used SW Woodland Lichen in a satin finish. To finish the transformation, I spray painted my toilet paper holder black and added simple painted wood knobs that I had leftover from an Ikea dresser.

I’m really happy with how simple and impactful this project was and am already thinking about where else I can do this! This project only cost $20 after the trim pieces and paint. The bathroom has a long way to go before being perfect, but it’s off to a good start!

This post was written for the  Collected Eclectic blog.

Collected Eclectic was a passion project focused on recording the process as Grace and Michael van Meurer transformed their builder grade home in to something special.

124 blog posts were published between 2018 and 2021. Explore the complete Collected Eclectic archive here. 

Learn more about the project here. 

Suggested Reading