Kitchen Revamp: A Vanity in the Kitchen?

Like any roommates who love food and have a small kitchen we needed more storage. Let me stress the small kitchen space again. Minimal cabinet room around here. So we moved our eating island and contemplated our possibilities. With some shelving ideas in mind we headed to our favorite antique store. Just like it always does, our project size grew as we walked around the store. After an hour and a half we decided on a shelving unit with a counter top and an antique vanity, also multiple glass decanters and canisters. Needless to say it was a successful day, especially since both of us only spent around twenty five dollars. Our purchases looked like this coming out of the store...

$20 Antique Vanity.

The antique vanity cost twenty dollars and was in need of a good scrubbing. However we immediately thought it was adorable and fell in love with the possibilities. This was no where near what we expected to get for our kitchen storage, I mean it is a vanity, but it's charm won us over. Just keep reading and you will see what we mean. All we did to this was give it a good cleaning with a Mr.Clean Magic Eraser. It definitely worked its magic, the vanity looks marvelous and shiny once again.

$22 Counter shelves with counter top, in desperate need of love 

This very red and bland counter was twenty two dollars. As you can see we really had to use our imagination to see what we were going to do with this. However it was definitely the item in the store that would give us the most storage for our dollar. The first step was sanding down some of the red plastic counter top. Previous owners burned a spot on it which created a large round ripple. Once sanded smooth we were able to add some basic contact adhesive paper from Walmart, this meant we could say goodbye to the aged red! What I believe was a key step in this project was taking the time to precisely cut around the metal edge. This really gave it a nice, finished, professional look. We wanted it to still look like a counter top and not just a shelving unit. After a coat or two of some left over antique white paint was added it looks like a completely different piece, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

The Finished Project

The colors all ended up looking like they were really forever meant to be together. The finial price breakdown  for these revamp looks something like this;

The Vanity: $20, No additional cost besides some elbow grease, cleaner, and screws which we already had.

The Counter: $22, and we paid $5 for a roll of adhesive contact paper for the top. The paint we had from a previous project so a grand total of $27. The decanters and canisters were $2-$4 each and the basket we are using for bread was $2.