Master Bathroom Makeover Reveal + CD Towers turned Vanity Storage

Well, here she is! In all of her more modern than cottage (but still a good mix of both) glory, our Master Bathroom Makeover is finally done!!! Oh how sweet the sound; the last part of that sentence. haha! It's always so exciting to be able to check-off another finished room on our huge "spaces to makeover" list, but like I mentioned before, this project threw us for a loop. With a LOT of brainstorming on how to make this bathroom "House of Smiths worthy" (aka: pretty, organized AND functional) we eventually pulled it off, and now we can show you all the fun little details through pictures!

Bathroom Vanity Tutorial

Layered Molding Board & Batten Tutorial

Bird - Down to Earth, Greenery and small Mirror - Ikea, Sink - Villeroy & Boch

DIY Decorative Tile Wall Art Tutorial

Shelf, Silver canister and Yellow box - HomeGoods, Frame - Down to Earth, Monogram print - Brightsides Design

Light and Ceiling medalion - Lowe's

Round mirror - Joss & Main, Bath accessories - World Market, Outlet covers and Hardware - Lowe's

Yellow sign lettering - HofS Design Shop, White rag rug - World Market, Yellow rug - Thomas Paul via Joss & Main

One of the really cool DIY features that we've been dying to show you in this space, are our Ikea CD towers turned  bathroom vanity storage! It was all Cason's idea and it worked SO well!

 

We both knew we needed just a little extra storage in this space, but just weren't exactly sure how to go about it, until we were strolling through Ikea one day and Cason said... "Babe, hear me out... if we're going to build shelves or something for the top of our counter anyway, why not just get these CD towers and cut them down? They've already got drilled holes, shelves AND a notch in the back to go over the granite backsplash!"

Yeah... he's all sorts of awesome, I know.

:)

Like we do with most of our big projects we started with a sketch idea. Cason came up with the below image at the beginning (before the CD rack idea)... and I must say, I think we did a pretty good job of replicating it!

Here's a quick tutorial on how we did it:

First we assembled the 2 Ikea CD towers, measured how far apart they needed to be on our counter top and then ran a board along the top of both towers, to make one cohesive piece.

Then we built a 3 sided box on top of the first board base, holding the two towers together. Mainly this was done to add height and create somewhere for us to adhere the crown molding to, so the whole thing looked a lot more like a built-in unit.

The small board across the bottom in this photo was just used temporarily to hold the whole unit together, so it was stable and to keep it square.

Lighting came next. We used a hole drilling bit on the end of our drill and made three holes for our integrated lighting fixtures we got from Ikea.

As you can see below, they were fitted into each space, and then wired from the top, into our existing outlet. (that's what Cason's working on in the photo)

Cason does really well with electrical-type projects, but we had to get a little creative with rigging everything up and then had an electrician friend come make sure everything looked okay. If you're just changing out one light for another, straight across, then doing it yourself works awesome!... but if things call for a little bit more maneuvering, you might want to call in an electrician to help do the job.

:)

I love the look on Cason's face as the lights came on and worked for the first time. He looks like a little kid doing a science experiment. ha! Gotta love when things just work like they're suppose to, eh?

While Cason was busy playing electrician, my Dad attached some decorative molding to the front of the cabinet with a pin nailer and he also attached the doors we made to the fronts of the CD towers.

To make the doors we just used a primed MDF board and routered the edges to give them some interest. Easy as that!

Once the whole unit was mounted to the wall in our bathroom, we puttied the nail holes, painted the unfinished parts and then caulked up any gaps or spaces. After that was done my Dad helped create a template for our new hardware and drilled the holes so that I could screw them on.

In the end... This is how it all turned out. We la-la-la-LOVE it!

Visually it's a really cool piece to have in the bathroom, because it totally changes the whole look of the space, but it's also given us the AWESOME additional storage we needed as well! We definitely hit the jackpot here and got the best of both worlds, with minimal work.

I can't believe that this bathroom is FINALLY done. Eeee!

Now... for a nice, long, hot bubble bath.

:)