Refinishing a Wood Bathroom Vanity (Part 1): Preparation & Stripping

January 13, 2013 by Mandi

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We have absolutely no budget for a bathroom remodel, so I’m going into DIY mode to refinish this vanity using leftover supplies from my kitchen cabinet refinishing project. Due mostly to dry times, refinishing my master bathroom vanity was about a five day project with about 3-5 hours a day of work each day except the first (which was super quick).

In this series of posts, I’ll walk you through all the steps of refinishing a wood bathroom vanity:

Stripping the wood varnish (or paint, if yours is painted)
Sanding for a nice smooth surface
Priming so the enamel sticks
Painting a durable enamel

Let’s begin!

Empty the Bathroom

The very first step is to remove everything that isn’t related to this home improvement project. It’s going to get extremely messy and dusty in here as we strip varnish and sand the cabinet faces.

Unless, of course, you can take your vanity or cabinet doors outside, which I couldn’t thanks to near constant rain during the week I spent refinishing this vanity.

This is the cleanest this room will look for the next 5 days.

Remove Existing Hardware

Removing the cabinet hardware (knobs and such) is also essential – painting around things is bad. Very bad.

Apply Stripping Gel

CitriStrip worked very well on my kitchen cabinet project, so I’m using it again on this one. One bottle has been enough for both my kitchen and now this bathroom.

Citristrip stripping gel great for refinishing a bathroom vanity DIY

Citristrip smells like an orange Popsicle.

Since all I’m removing here in the bathroom is a thin layer of varnish, I don’t need to lay the Citristrip on too thick: just a thin but consistent layer on every wood surface ought to do it. For this step I use a cheap plastic paint brush and a few paper towels.

I’ll come back in 24 hours to scrape and sand the peeling varnish.

Hardware off, Citristrip on

Filed Under: Home Improvement Tagged With: bathroom, painting, refinishing, vanity

Patching ceiling drywall next to range hood exhaust duct

January 11, 2013 by Mandi

Our new range hood vent is smaller than the hole used by our old microwave’s exhaust duct. Here’s the problem: a 5” wide x 2” deep gap adjacent to the range hood’s ventilation duct.

patching ceiling drywall next to range hood exhaust duct

Funny how the crappy microwave needed a larger vent hole than our awesome range hood.

Here’s what didn’t work

Bad Idea #1): Curved piece for curved hole

Here’s my crescent-moon stencil, same shape as the ceiling hole

And here’s the drywall piece I ended up with after 20 minutes of cutting and shaving.

The piece fits! …but what will keep it up there?

I wish I’d thought to try this before I cut the darn piece out: the anchor wood won’t fit into the hole with enough space for my fingers to hold it down while I drill it into place.

This strip of wood has to straddle the hole – and my fingers need to hold it down. There’s no room for my fingers.

Solution: I made the hole bigger (and rectangular).

Obviously, the solution is to make my ceiling hole even larger. (I did this when no one else was home to question my methodology, which was smart because this must have looked insane.)

Anyway, I was trucking along with this bigger/more rectangular hole. I even found a thicker “anchor strip” of wood (if there’s a technical term for this, I don’t know it) to use.

This bar of wood will give the new drywall piece something to hang from.

New “wood bar” screwed into place. The new drywall will also screw onto the wood bar.

And that’s about when Bad Idea #2 revealed itself: The new patch piece? Yeah, it’s 1/4” thicker than the ceiling’s drywall. There’s no way to “gloss over” this – I need to find thinner drywall, and cut another freaking piece (~20 minutes of cutting and shaving).

patching ceiling drywall drywall too thick

Derp, the drywall I chose for the second patch was too thick.

I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me that the piece I was making was hella thick:

Like, a lot thicker.

Anyway, I found a thinner scrap and cut another piece. This time, it was the right thickness, the right shape, and I was able to anchor it to my “anchor wood”.

patching ceiling drywall screwed into anchor

Patch in place and screwed into the anchor wood.

Sweet! I began smoothing everything over with a few layers of spackle. Texture and painting will come later, once this has dried.

patching ceiling drywall spackling ceiling

Spackling the ceiling patch.

Something that isn’t obvious from these photos is the absolutely awkward angle I was working at. The range hood is large, and the ceiling is low once I’m on the ladder, so I did most of this work bent at the waist with my head pressed against the ceiling, sideways, while standing on a stepladder. Glad this one’s done!

Filed Under: Home Improvement Tagged With: ceiling, patch

Budget DIY Kitchen Remodel: Contractor for Range Hood Electrical

January 7, 2013 by Mandi

I can’t believe it’s been 9 months since this range hood went in and we’re still working around the dangling cord. We thought we could handle wiring the cord into the wall, but to be honest, it’s beyond us. The wall studs and the existing wiring are beyond our abilities.

So I hired Elkay Services to finish the job, plus knock several additional items off my to-do list:

wire the range hood into the wall (thus getting rid of its cord)
repair the overhead lights that lost power while I was hammering the ceiling
cover the floor outlet with an appropriate cover
cut and install the range hood’s duct cover (bonus project!)

For about $400 this was completely worth it. Here’s how it all turned out!

Range hood before, with exposed/taped duct and dangly cord:

Range hood after, now wired into the electrical within the wall and with the duct cover cut to fit. (Notice the gap between the duct cover and the ceiling – I’ll be patching that ceiling hole myself in the near future.)

Floor outlet, before:

Floor outlet, after:

Forward progress, whoo! My next kitchen project will be patching the ceiling hole near the range hood duct exposed when the tape was removed:

Filed Under: Home Improvement Tagged With: electrical, range hood, wiring

DIY Standing Desk: Planning and Building

January 6, 2013 by Mandi

My last workplace had a nice perk: a standing desk option! In the midst of layoff-day packing up, I grabbed a photo to help me remember how nice this setup was:

The question that’s been on my mind since then is, of course, How can I bring home the awesomeness of standing up all day?

Other/better articles have already covered in depth the benefits (and risks) of standing, but my motivation is simple: it just feels better. Sitting 8-10 hours makes my butt and legs sore, makes me have to exercise a lot more to feel tired by the end of the day, and just feels slouchy and lazy. I did not adapt to sitting again, so I set out to build my own DIY standing desk.

My Current Desk

My current desk is an IKEA GALANT, with two additional sections attached the left side to widen it. Someone already modded/IKEA-hacked this desk in its previous life, but this same desk plus extensions can still be found at IKEA as of 2013.

The simplest/most obvious solution to elevate this desk to standing height by swapping out its existing legs in favor of legs that would extend to at least 41”, which is the distance between the floor and my elbow. Fortunately, IKEA provides such legs, the VIKA BYSKE, which go to a maximum of 42”. (This max-height works for me, but not for my husband who will need a height of 47” in his own standing desk.)

Anyway, we picked up the 5 legs from IKEA for $30 each and got to work on attaching them.

Three Complications

VIKA BYSKE legs come with their own “bracket”, they don’t screw into a separate bracket like other legs of this style. This meant we had to remove the existing brackets from the table, even though they were IKEA and look exactly the same
IKEA has slightly changed the size/arrangement of screw holes on its leg brackets, so these new legs with their fused-on brackets couldn’t re-use the existing holes from the previous brackets
VIKA BYSKE legs are SUPER ANNOYING to extend. It took my husband and I about 20 minutes of wrist-agony to twist all five legs to 41”.

Some shots of the underside of the desk:

Attaching Longer Legs

We took everything off the desk and flipped it upside down to attach the legs. Once the new legs were on and we stood it back up, several new problems were revealed:

My monitors are too low by at least 6 inches
The desk is WOBBLY

I first took a trip to Staples where I was disappointed by their selection of monitor stands. They aren’t tall enough, and they didn’t seem robust enough the widescreens. Ultimately, just to make the desk usable in the meantime, I balanced a book shelf over four small paint cans and put the center monitor onto that. This disrupts my usual workflow, though, as using the other two monitors is rather unpleasant on my neck/upper back. But I think I could build or find something with a bit more looking, so I’m not particularly worried about this problem.

The wobbly feeling has me much more concerned.

We could attach more legs, but will it be enough? The one leg at left is definitely underpowered for the kind of support it needs to provide now.

Anchoring to the Wall

I was wandering around Home Depot when inspiration struck: shelf brackets! Two shelf brackets and a about 20 minutes of EZ-Anchors and drilling later, the desk was anchored to the wall and completely stabilized. I anchored it 1 inch off the wall to leave room for curtains and wires. The desk is rock solid now, woohoo!

Project Cost

IKEA GALANT desktop – free (picked it up off the curb)
5 VIKA BYSKE legs – $125 ($25/each)
2 heavy duty shelf brackets – $12

TOTAL: $137

What’s Next?

With that resolved, it’s time to move onto a more challenging project. Next up: I’m going to build one for my husband, who is 6’4” and too tall for the solution we used for mine.

Some “ready made” standing desks I’ve found online go high enough for him, but they have many shortcomings:

Insufficient monitor space (most seem built for one monitor, tops)
Too expensive (largely thanks to features we don’t need, like electrically powered up/down)
Too small in general – no one makes a standing corner desk… but I will be the first. >:)

Update: We built it! Check out my husband’s super tall standing desk right here.

Filed Under: Home Improvement Tagged With: IKEA, standing desk

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