a custom vanity made for a cat
I told y’all a little bit about our renovation story here, but when they ripped everything out from the water damage, the half bathroom vanity had to go too. That was perfectly fine with me because it was poorly painted a high gloss brown and one of the doors barely opened. The half bath was the project that we were dragging our feet on the longest. I don’t think we finished it for about 6 months after the rest of the renovations were complete, but it was mostly because my design brain was a little stumped.
See, we used to have a litter box in our pantry, but when we redid our kitchen, the pantry didn’t exist any longer. I needed to figure out a solution for hiding the cat box because there was no way I was just going to leave it sitting on our floor and I really didn’t want to relocate it to one of our upstairs bathrooms, so I hatched a plan to include it with our half bath vanity.
First, I repainted the bathroom. I had originally painted the half bath black when we first moved in and I LOVED the color, but it showed every imperfection in the walls and I was ready for a change. I settled on this pretty green that just happened to match my Rifle Paper Co prints perfectly. I had also already spray painted the original light fixture gold since it was originally silver and had an ugly purple glass piece that I was able to remove. If I were to replace the fixture, I’m obsessed with this one and it comes in plenty of colors and different sizes.
For the vanity, I started with trying a pre-made vanity from IKEA, but after getting all the way there (to Charlotte), I realized it didn’t fit the space properly. I thought about building something ourselves, but I knew getting something pre-made would be cheaper than building it ourselves if we wanted to do a stone countertop. Then I started looking into furniture pieces that we could convert into a vanity - also out of luck there because of sizing. I knew we could’ve found something eventually, but after months of no faucet in the bathroom I was already a little desperate. I resorted to looking at what Lowes and Home Depot had available. Still nada. So we went back to the drawing board and I sketched up a wall-to-wall vanity with rounded corners and a wood top. To save costs, I knew I wanted to use cheaper wood and paint most, if not all a high gloss black.
So we picked up some MDF and Seb got started on the cutting. The trick to my plan was that we get the vanity off the ground. I wanted something the cats could easily go in and out of from the bottom of the cabinet so that we could keep the litter box inside the vanity with the doors closed. I ordered a set of legs, sink, faucet and handles from Amazon and we were able to get the thing assembled without much trouble. But then I started with the paint. I knew painting MDF and achieving a high gloss look would be challenging. I tried a few different paints and dabbled with and without primer. I ended up realizing that it just takes a few coats of a high gloss paint + polyurethane to really make it shine.
If I were to do it again, I would use a paint pad so that I didn’t have to be so careful about brush strokes but I LOVE the rounded corners and the top mounted sink. All in all, we’re really happy with the finished product! The cats are able to discreetly use our half bath and we have a functional (and beautiful) vanity.
