Vanity

I've been thinking of functionality a lot. And how to make my works space, well, work. Since my bedroom and studio are the same room I need to do whatever I can to make it feel like a real work space. The other complication of this apartment is the tiny bathroom with nonexistent storage and not the most flattering light. Which means I store any hair/makeup type things in my room and will usually do any sort of "primping" at my desk in the morning. And due to my love of sleeping in until the last possible moment, this usually results in my returning home to work and finding various morning ephemera strewn across my desk. Which is not very encouraging to getting any creative work done. So last week I made a (somewhat snap) decision, to come up with another space to do this. A vanity of sorts. And since I have a large closet and that's already where all my clothes and jewelry are, I thought why not. 

Of course this choice led me down a rabbit hole of looking for a table height piece of furniture that was no more than 12 inches deep. Which is rare and expensive or out of stock. Here i am thinking, all that I need is a narrow little tabletop ad some legs, why is this so hard? But luckily a light bulb moment while talking with my bff and a trip to the local hardware store (where they of course have everything that I've ever needed-at least in a home improvement sort of way) and all my problems are solved. The light bulb moment of course, was thinking why does the table have to have legs? Really all I need is the top of the table, why not a shelf? And why yes Cole Hardware does have a pre cut shelf in black (to match the shelf on the same wall that has my jewelry box) and brackets and plaster wall anchors. So less than 20 bucks and a bunch of hand screwing brackets later and I had my vanity space. Below you can see my brilliant method for holding the shelf in place at the right height while I screwed into the anchors.

Next step was storage. I of course looked at all the pretty carts and shelves at Ikea and Target and the Container Store. But it is always awesome to figure out a solution that costs zero dollars so before purchasing anything I took a look around the apartment and realized I did have something that could be re-purposed. Again. 

Remember the little metal cart in my kitchen? It's to the left of the work table in the above picture. It was originally craft storage in 2004 with rainbow drawers. Then it became in order, bathroom storage, a tiny bar cart and then kitchen storage. I was able to rearrange my kitchen a bit to no longer need the cart there and though I could change it up a little bit to make it seem new and exciting again. Which of course meant some gold spray paint and fun pink paper, both of which I already had on hand. So free!

The very last thing I needed was a place to sit at said vanity. Enter a chance encounter with Ikea and the pretty cool looking (and also crazy inexpensive) Marius stool plus some things I had on hand (white faux fur and more gold spray paint) and that was taken care of as well.

All that was left was organizing the shelves, adding a shiny gold lamp and some fun art. I have very much enjoyed my mornings so far this week getting ready at this little spot. It is not only convenient to have everything right there in the open instead of tucked away in boxes, but I also enjoy having the closet function more as a dressing room. It makes getting up in the morning a little less tiresome.