I did this vanity at about the same time as the Nouveau-Deco Dresser, not knowing I would be hooked on interior decorating. So I apologize: I don’t seem to have any Before pictures.

 

The best way to describe the piece was it looked a lot like a teacher’s school desk out of the Little Rascals. A yellow-orange wood, heavily marred, scratched and covered in watermarks from drink glasses. The drawer pulls were a rusting base metal and there was no mirror back to the vanity. It was like a silent screen actress who’d aged badly.

 

But, like the dresser, there wasn’t anything structurally wrong with it. And because all the other pieces in the bedroom were painted to reflect the colors in my bedding, I painted this as well-- in a muted Antique Gold-- hoping to restore a little bit of glamour to it. The handles were sprayed in the same Antique Gold. As always, I made sure everything I painted had a clear topcoat on it, to protect the finish.

 

To install one of the round beveled mirrors that were so popular on deco pieces (I bought one at Lowe’s), I cut a back to support the mirror out of a simple pine board, making it into a rectangle that would overlap the back of the mirror by a little over half its height. I then spray-painted it to match the body of the vanity. On a flat surface, I placed the mirror where I wanted it to go, and then with a pencil, traced around the mirror. I  screwed clear plastic mirror clips into a semi-circle in several key spots around the semi-circle I’d drawn on the wooden board. Then I nailed the board directly to the upper vanity back and lowered the mirror in, securing the clips. The whole process to add the mirror took me about an hour, and the project itself took only a few hours.