Vintage Vanity Makeover

Giving this vintage vanity a makeover was a project that I put off for a couple of months after I brought it home with me. I debated on how I wanted to give it a new look. It had previously been painted a drab brown color, so I knew that had to go. In trying to decide between giving it a new paint color or stripping it down to the bare wood and staining it,  I weighed the pros and cons of each. Ultimately, I decided to paint it using a color that would go well in our master bedroom. If you’re on team never paint, no doubt you’ll think I made the wrong choice, but I’ve always thought as long as you a love how a piece looks, it’s not the wrong choice. 

This vanity is part of a set of bedroom furniture that I recently brought home from my mother’s house. We moved our mother into my oldest sister’s home in April. Sadly, she’s reached a point at which she could no longer live alone. She didn’t want her furniture to be sold, so she encouraged family members to take what we could use. There were no takers for this bedroom set, other than the bed. It consisted of the vanity, a large chest of drawers, and a small night table. 

My mother wasn’t the original owner of the set. She purchased it from an estate sell of a distant family member. I did some research on the vanity and found one that was very similar online. It dates to the late 1940s. It has the legs of a mid century modern piece, but the round mirror is found in a lot of late 40s art deco pieces. Here’s how it looked at my mother’s home. With it looking like this, it wasn’t something that anyone else wanted to take home. But, it wasn’t something I could pass up! I just had to decide what to do with it. 

I decided to start with the small night table. I used CitriStrip paint and varnish stripping gel to remove the paint. I’ll do a post about using that soon and show you the makeover that the night table got. What I learned from doing that small piece was that I didn’t want to strip the vanity down to bare wood to stain it. That’s how I came to the decision to paint the vanity.

We removed the mirror before transporting the piece to our house. 

In this photo, you can see that the previous paint job this piece had wasn’t a very good one. 

After removing the hardware, I used my palm sander to smooth away the ridges and the brush lines. I didn’t try to remove the paint, just smooth it out. I cleaned the entire piece with TSP before starting to paint.

The glass shelf can only be removed if you remove the entire back panel of the vanity. That wasn’t going to happen! Before painting, I used painter’s tape to tape the glass surface on the top and bottom of the glass.

Since I knew I was not going to be painting anything else this shade, I didn’t want to buy a lot of extra paint. Most chalky paint comes in at least a quart size can. That was way more than I needed to for this piece. I used Craft Smart Multi-Surface Premium Chalky Acrylic Paint in Deep Peach. It didn’t turn out as deeply peach as I would have liked, but I was happy with it.

Look at these drawer pulls! Apparently the last time this piece was painted, the pulls were not removed. They were covered in brown paint. I used paint stripper to remove the paint and then painted them using the same Krylon Metallic Paint in copper that I used for the bench makeover.

With the sunshine pouring in from the window, the piece looks more pink than peach, but it does have a peach hue to it.

I paired it with the small folding bench that I recently purchased at Goodwill. The makeover for the bench looks great next to the soft color of the vanity. 

This vintage vanity makeover turned out to be a nice addition to our bedroom. It’s a great piece for holding my nail polish and accessories, perfumes,  and the triple bar bracelet holder. The drawers are large and who doesn’t need more storage? I always do, so these will be full in no time. 

I’m glad that I found a way to update the old piece of furniture from my mother’s house that works with our decor.

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Vintage Vanity Makeover

We’ll be sharing at lots of these great parties!