There’s little to report these days here at Angie’s Roost (aka…casa de Colby & Angie). Mostly because our house is looking alot like this these days:
That’s our hallway floor COMPLETELY covered in drywall dust. We’re currently in the middle of a massive mudding/sanding expedition in both our second floor and first floor hallways, and also in the dining room. We’re getting closer to the end but there’s still a ways to go before the priming and painting can occur. It wouldn’t be so bad but we’re quickly learning that old houses come with no right angles and nothing level resulting in lots of necessary mud. Thus, sanding/mudding is 100 times more difficult! It also doesn’t help that we both HATE sanding/mudding (I’m the sander and Colby is the mudder) so we only work in one to two hour increments. I know we should just spend an afternoon and hammer out the whole thing but it’s best for our relationship that we don’t since we both get uber grumpy and mad after a couple of hours working. More from this never ending project later once my hands regain feeling from all the sandpaper usage.
To keep our sanity, we started planning out our bathroom vanity. We haven’t had a real vanity in over a year so it’s high time we got rolling on that project. We originally wanted to find a dresser at a yard sale or thrift store that we could convert into a bathroom vanity but after a year of searching with no success, we gave up on that option. We decided to build our own vanity and had a few ideas for it, depending on what we chose for the vanity top. One option was to install a stone top so we hopped in the car and headed down to a local shop, Qualey Granite in Veazie, to see what they had for options and price it out. We needed about a 48″ x 24″ slab which would cost us about $430 if we installed it ourselves. Because it was a smaller size we needed to use a remnant, which is a leftover from another person’s kitchen counter project. We searched through all the remnants but didn’t really find anything that jumped out at us. There were a few white slabs that were okay but if we’re spending $430 for a vanity top we better love it! So scratch that idea.
I kind of gave up on the vanity project momentarily and started to work on refinishing the bathroom mirror since it is all kinds of ugly. After picking out my spray paint at Lowes I went over to the tile section to visit some glass mosaic tile that I had fallen in love with a few months ago. They’re square glass mosaic tiles in a light aqua color that I thought would make an amazing vanity top. I had actually gone so far as to buy a few squares back in April to test them out with the bright yellow wall color in the bathroom. They were a perfect fit color wise but I still returned them since I wasn’t ready to make the purchase & commitment just yet. We were still in an undecided state on what we wanted to do for a bathroom vanity. But during my Sunday afternoon visitation I found them on clearance. On CLEARANCE! I took that as a sign that we were meant to bring these tiles home and design the vanity around them. I ran home, measured, well Colby measured since I’m not so good at spatial relations type stuff, I’m much better at make it pretty stuff. I ran back to Lowes and picked up 10 tiles for a whopping $27.90 which is a HUGE difference from the $430 price tag for stone. Granted we still have to buy the rest of our materials (plywood, grout, adhesive) but it’s still going to cost significantly less than stone. The tiles were on clearance for $2.79, down from $4.98. They were originally inexpensive compared to similar products because they’re recycled glass tiles, but a savings is a savings. Without further ado, here are the tiles for our to be built bathroom vanity:
The tile in real life has a bit more color to it. They got a little washed out with the camera. Regardless, I love the tile. It’s got a bit of a milk glass vibe going on which I love! Now with the tile selected and purchased it was time to start designing the vanity, which was pretty easy. I keep some serious idea files for moments like these and a relied on a simple vanity design from a recent “Storage” publication, which was a special edition magazine from Better Homes & Gardens. Here is the inspiration photo:
It’s the white vanity on the right side. It was simple and perfect. We had two requirements for the vanity: it had to be free standing (just because that’s what we preferred, we didn’t want to attach it to the walls) and it had to have some toe room underneath. This necessity was because of the vent grate that we found buried under the old bathroom floor. It’s so pretty and needs not to be covered up. With the inspiration picture in hand, Colby went to work in Google SketchUp to design our new masterpiece. He’s still working on it but here’s the progress so far:
The doors are throwing us for a loop and we’re still trying to figure out what to do with them. Oh, and for those of you unfamiliar with Google SketchUp, it’s awesome! It’s free design software from Google that’s a little difficult to learn at first, but once you get the basics you could design anything you can imagine from furniture pieces to entire houses. It’s a really cool tool and I encourage you all to check it out.
So that’s what we’ve been up to here at Angie’s Roost, pretty uneventful so hopefully we get into some more exciting projects and finally finish all that damn sanding and mudding.
Pssst….do you hate mudding and sanding as much as we do? Or do you have another house project that you can’t stand? Anyone out there love drywall sanding and want to come help us? Please?! Pretty please?! C’mon…don’t make me beg!
