The Vanity That Made It Into Our Wedding Vows - One Room Challenge Week 4

Okay guys, as I promised last week - this week is all about the dresser we turned into a vanity for the guest bathroom! We didn’t actually accomplish a ton during week 4 of the One Room Challenge, but I’m gonna attempt to do a quick break down of how the dresser turned vanity came to be!

But first of all - let me jump into story time re: the title of this post. In our last guest bathroom, we also had a dresser that we turned into a vanity, and my husband kind of hated me for it. He was confused what I was even talking about when I first told him the idea, and then he was all unsure about how he was going to do it… and then threw out some expletives during it… and then loved it afterwards and always pointed it out to people when we showed them around the house. (Insert eye roll emoji here) Anyway, one of our wedding vows was along the lines of “thanks for going along with all of my crazy house ideas, like turning dressers into vanities”… and here we are again for round 2! (Side note - I was just telling Elizabeth how Dairy Queen was also in our wedding vows… these clearly were not your traditional wedding vows - ha!)

Okay, back to present day. I love the idea of a dresser turned vanity because it adds a lot of character to a space, and is also super cost effective. Have you ever shopped for vanities? Those things do NOT come cheap, but you know what does? A $55 midcentury dresser from Craigslist. Pop a vessel sink and a faucet on that baby and boom - affordable vanity!

Here’s a brief step by step of how to turn a dresser into a vanity:

Step one

Cut a hole in the back of the dresser to accommodate the plumbing. In our case, our sink was going to be off to the left side, so that’s where the hole went. You can slide the dresser into the final resting place after you’ve done this.

step two

Cut two wholes in the top of the dresser - one for the faucet and one for the sink drain.

step three

Modify the drawers that are in front of the plumbing. If you want to maintain some storage space in the drawers, you can cut out a large notch in the drawers that will fit around in the plumbing. Or, do what we did here and just cut the back of the drawer off. We have plenty more storage space in this dresser (and the bathroom in general) so I didn’t feel the need to keep any parts of these drawers intact.

step four

Install the faucet, vessel sink, and drain, and hook up all of the plumbing. I’m not a plumber, so that’s about as much detail as I’ll provide on that step! ;)

So there you have it! The super basic, in-a-nutshell guide to turning a dresser into a vanity. I’m sure there are much more thorough and technical tutorials out there, but hopefully you get the gist from this! I’m so happy with how our vanity turned out, and the whole thing was less than $150. You can’t even get a crappy IKEA vanity for that price! (Edit: I’m not hating on IKEA - I loveeee IKEA)

Over the next two weeks we’ll be putting the finishing touches on this room - painting and organizing the linen closet that’s in here, and doing the fun part - accessorizing! Make sure you go check out everyone else’s One Room Challenge progress this week too!

3 Things to Look for When Buying a Fixer Upper

Let me preface this post by saying I am by no means an expert, but I wanted to give you my two cents about what to look for when you're buying a fixer upper! Ryan and I spent a lot of time combing through real estate listings and trying to make the best decision when it came to buying our fixer upper of a house last April. These were the factors that I kept coming back to over and over again, and evaluated for each property we looked at.

Location (...Location, Location!)

If you have ever searched for a home (or met a realtor for that matter), I'm SURE you're familiar with location being THE most important factor when it comes to buying a home. You can change a lot of things about a house, but you sure as hell can't pick it up and move it, so you'd better be sure that you loveeee the location you choose! A few major location factors to consider are your commute to work, proximity to things you like to do or to where your friends live, and what area of town you actually like! 

School zone is also important for a couple of reasons. Obviously, if you have kids you don't want them going to a school that has terrible ratings. But even if you're offspring-free, if you choose a house within a bad school zone, it will make reselling tough. That was our biggest concern, since we have NO kid plans anytime soon. One of the areas close to the house we bought is great - but zoned for one of THE worst high schools in town. That was a deal breaker for us. By looking just a couple miles away from that area, we still stayed in the same general area that we loved, but were able to get into a much more desirable school zone. Win-win! 

Price per square foot (How Low Can You Go?)

This little number may not matter to you quite as much if you have no plans of ever selling your home, but if you do then you'll probably live and die by it! Ideally, you want to aim for a price per square foot that is as LOW as possible, and definitely under what other homes in the area are selling for. As a little frame of reference, when we bought our house, others in the area were selling for roughly $120/square foot. Our house was $78/square foot. That is quite the difference, and allowed us room to put money into renovating the house and still feel confident that we could sell it for more than our investment. Again, you might not care about this number as much if your fixer upper will be your "forever home" (Ryan hates that term, haha) but if you're trying to flip your house or move EVER, it's a great number to pay attention to! 

Potential (Within a Strict Renovation Budget) 

Yep, that was indeed our kitchen! All the praise hands that it no longer looks ANYTHING like that! ;) 

Ah, potential. That little thing you need to see in your fixer upper to make all of the work and headaches worth it. Let me tell you a little story. In almost every house we looked at, I saw potential. Behind the forest green carpets, pink walls, and vinyl countertops, I just knew every house we laid eyes on could be an amazing home with some TLC. Here's the thing - the dollar amount of TLC that these homes required varied greatly. There was a house we saw early on that was in the cutest neighborhood, and something about it really spoke to me when we walked in. Maybe it was the bathroom directly in the entryway, or the completely chopped up floor plan, or the Master bedroom that was too small to even fit our bed. Do you see where I'm going here? Although that house did indeed have potential... it was more like potential-that-will-take-$100K-to-unveil. We had a very specific renovation budget in mind when we started house hunting, and trust me, it sure wasn't $100K.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is - it's great to see the potential in houses that you look at (I mean, if you couldn't you wouldn't be searching for a fixer upper!), but be realistic about the amount of work and cold hard cash it'll take for that potential to become reality. 

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I hope this gave you a little insight for the next time you're on the hunt for a fixer upper of a home. I'd love to hear what made you pull the trigger on your latest fixer upper, or what factors YOU deem most important!