It's Here! Our New Bathroom Vanity Has Arrived!

It's here! It's here!

The new vanity for our downstairs bathroom renovation arrived yesterday afternoon, and we couldn't wait to get it opened.

We actually partially opened it up while the UPS Freight driver waited, just to make sure there was no damage to it in transport. But all was good on that end!

The main thing we were concerned about though, was the marble counter top, and what it would actually look like.

This had been causing me anxiety for the past week (well, as much anxiety as I get, since I'm usually a very decisive, no second guesses type of person). That's because we ordered this vanity sight unseen, online, from Brookstone of all places!

We'd I'd spent a ridiculous amount of time early last week on researching vanities online, after we couldn't find anything locally that was in our budget that we liked. Our main criteria was that it be 48 inches wide, white, transitional style cabinet base (specifically something with distinct legs), decent storage, and as far as the counter top went, something in a primarily white marble, with light grey marbling that wasn't too crazy/too marbled. And it had to be $1,400 or less for the vanity and counter top, although we didn't have a strong preference if they were sold separately or assembled.

Which isn't something that's very easy to find, especially online! No two slabs of marble are the same, and particularly when you're just dealing with pictures online and somewhat specific about the color and amount of marbling, it's definitely a risk!

So with a few back up options selected, and only after calling Brookstone to learn about their return policy and researching exactly how much returning the vanity would cost if it didn't work out (in case you're curious, they didn't have a restocking fee, we would just have to pay return shipping, which would be about $250), we decided to gamble and order it. Luckily the Simpli Home Chelsea Vanity was only $899.99, making it $500 under budget, so we knew we had some wiggle room, even if we had to pay the $250 to return it and order something else. Still, there was some hand wringing and some bad dreams over the past week, waiting in anticipation to see if the risk would pay off.

But it definitely worked out, we are in love!

We've opened it to make sure there's no cracks, the drawers open, etc, but for now are mostly trying to keep it under wraps, since it's in the garage at the moment, and we'll be getting things dirty with our demolition this weekend. But here's a tiny peek under the plastic, so you can appreciate the pretty marble.

Although probably the website photos would show it off a little better than the poor lighting in our garage! From the Brookstone website listing:

I just love all of that storage, and how those bottom drawers and the legs make it look a lot more special than your standard vanity cabinet bases, like our old one was. This is definitely a good example of the sliver lining in all of this. It's lame that we found a bunch of mold in the wall, but at least we now have an excuse to build exactly the bathroom that we want. And if there hadn't been mold along the wall the vanity is on (and inside of it, ick), we probably would have just repurposed the old one with paint and new doors or hardware. Now we get a beautiful new vanity and counter instead!

And now the best part (well, other than saving $500, which might come in handy somewhere else in our budget) is that we can finalize the rest of our bathroom design plans. The marble counter goes perfectly with the carrara marble shower surround tile and light grey floor tile we tentatively picked two weekends ago, so we can move forward with ordering those now. Plus, now I can finally share our renovation vision, and not just general-feel-of-the-bathroom inspiration photos, all of which was dependent on the tile, which was dependent on the vanity counter. More to details to come, once I round up my photos!