Yesterday I finished a little project I’d set myself way back when the beau and I were first designing our house extension. You see, I like that kitchens now use drawers in place of cupboards – much easier on your back and knees – and I wanted the same ease and practicality in our ensuite vanity unit.

Trouble is, the only ensuite vanity units available that had mostly drawers instead of mostly cupboards were very expensive and ultra modern, which wouldn’t suit our house. We also had the room for a double basin, but there were no vanity unit models with double basins and mostly drawers.

When I found a double basin vanity top available for just $250 I was delighted. We could get a cabinet made for it, which meant not only could I have all drawers, but it was cheaper! That’s when I hit upon the idea of having the drawer fronts made of unfinished particle board so I could paint them.

(The mistake we then made was to let the builder arrange the cabinet construction, which was a painful process involving two different cabinet makers and a few compromises. But the final version of the cabinet is not too far off what I’d specified.)

Once the cabinet had been built I whipped up a few designs for the beau to approve:

Affectionately called ‘champagne’, ‘scribble’, ‘bubbles’, ‘cheese’ and ‘boring’.

He chose ‘cheese’:

After which came several days of undercoating and layers of white. The fun part started when I printed out the pattern life-sized and taped it together. Yesterday I cut a template out of clear Contact:

Used a stenciling brush to apply two coats of paint:

Then tidied up the edges with a fine paint brush. This morning we put the handles on:

And there we have it, our ‘bespoke’ vanity unit.

What I love about this is I can change it any time I get sick of the design (well, sick of it enough to want to go through all the sanding and undercoating and repainting). In the past I’ve been reluctant to do anything too zany when decorating the houses I’ve owned, but since we intend to stay here for at least ten years, and in ten years you can be sure anything we do will need a touch up or be horribly out of fashion anyway, I figure I’m free to personalise things.