Giving Up My Vanity for a Laundry Room, Part I
Confessions of a Pioneer Woman  |  Sep 14, 2007 02:29 PM

We’re deep in the throes of various home improvements these days, and generally speaking, I’m not the home improvement type. After we survived redoing our kitchen five years ago, I determined that making major changes to my house just isn’t my ball of wax. There are way too many small decisions to make and besides that, I’d much rather spend thousands of dollars on piles of computer or photography equipment I don’t need than on things relating to my home.

Unfortunately, a strong thunderstorm damaged our back porch a couple of months ago and left us with no choice but to build a new one. We’re making progress on that front:

That would have been all well and good, except that while the contractor was assessing the damage to our porch, I asked him, in a moment of temporary insanity, to “have a look” at the shower in our master bathroom. I had suspected it was in trouble, as some of the tiles had started coming loose, the sheet rock around the shower was crumbling, and the grout in the shower floor was on its last leg. Turned out, the shower pan was kaput and was causing water damage to the surrounding walls.

The shower needed a total overhaul, our contractor confirmed, and we began making plans to retile it.

Then (yes, what you think is about to happen is about to happen) we decided to add tile around our bathtub, too, as the wall surrounding it had never been tiled and for months our four children had been eating the paint chips that were peeling away. (This may explain a lot, but that’s another story for another time.)

Then (yes, again) we looked at the wall of the shower. “If that’s going to have to be redone,” I said to my husband, Marlboro Man, “don’t you think you should just go ahead and re-do your sink and countertop?” As fetching as the lime green Formica and chocolate brown Kohler sink were in 1983 when his mom first chose them, they’d never really screamed “New Millennium” to me:

In addition, the faucets were badly corroded–a side-effect of hard country water—and I just thought it would be nice for my man to have a brand new bathroom sink in his life.

Then (here we go) Marlboro Man said, “Well, what about your sink? We can’t change mine and leave yours the way it is.” I looked across our bedroom at my vanity—my spacious, eight-foot-long vanity that, despite the lime green Formica and chocolate brown sink, I’d always really liked having. From the brass-trimmed eighties make-up lights surrounding the wall-size mirror, to the roomy countertop on which to set all my lotions and potions, my vanity had always served me just fine. But the many coats of paint on the cabinets had been chipping off for some time, and then there was the small matter of my home waxing kit, which had spilled and hardened under my sink last year, forever cementing all manner of Q-tips, stray hairs, and emery boards to the mess in a modern-day La Brea Tar Pit. My vanity, I realized, had seen better days.

Then I started envisioning The New Vanity, and suddenly I became exceedingly interested in home improvement. Oh, what I could do with this eight-foot long space: new, expensive cabinetry and pulls, new and beautiful light fixtures, sleek countertops, maybe even a whole drawer specifically designed for my stash of Dr. Pepper Bonne Bell Lip Smacker. I could think of nothing better in the world.

That night as I attempted to dig out from under an impossibly mountainous pile of laundry, I fantasized about my new vanity: the makeup I’d apply, the pores I’d squeeze, the hairstyles I’d try, the eyebrows I’d tweeze. That’s when Marlboro Man walked by as I was folding the seventieth pair of underwear of the evening. “You know, what you really ought to do is make your laundry room bigger.” I had no idea why he would have said that:

Okay, maybe I did. Our washer and dryer, after all, were basically sitting in a closet, and the clothing demands of a household of six people on a cattle ranch usually proved to be way too much for that area to handle. But there was one small problem: the only possible way to make our laundry room bigger would be to cut into my vanity space. Houston, we have a problem.

To be continued…