Ironically enough for us, one of the things that delighted us most when we looked at this house was the closets.

Our old apartment had a lot going for it — natural light, vintage charm, hardwood floors — but one thing it did not have a lot of was closet space. We had two not-very-large closets in the bedroom, and squeezing all of Kate’s clothes into 6 sq.ft. was a tall ask. So when we walked upstairs on our first visit to the new house and saw the closets for the first time, it was love.

Kate felt a little bad about taking the larger closet at first, but then (she says) she just reminded herself that she has an arsenal of Fancy Lady Supplies, a full professional wardrobe, and a high need for sartorial variety, whereas all of my clothing needs are met with a two-week supply of jeans and black t-shirts.

So, obviously, one of our first projects had to be making the closet into the fabulous badass punk femme dressing room we knew it was meant to be. We already had the bright magenta rug as a starting point, and found a cute pink ottoman at a nearly consignment store for $30 that made a perfect tuffet. Now we needed a small vanity to use as a makeup table.

I have recently come to love furniture shopping on Facebook Marketplace. Yes, Facebook is an evil vampire squid hellbent on hoovering up all our behavioral data and selling it to the highest bidder, but apparently it’s where all the cool kids sell their old housewares now instead of Craigslist. I spent a couple of weeks scrolling through looking for The One, a vanity table that was the perfect width and height to fit the space under the sloped ceiling, and no awkwardly tall mirrors, and, y’know, could be made cute, and sending Kate anything I found for her thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

And we found The One:

So I made the necessary arrangements, drove down to East Atlanta, gave the nice man $20 and drove off with a little red wooden vanity rattling around in the trunk of our car.

We already knew we wanted to match one of the tones from the rug, so we grabbed a selection of likely paint swatches from our friendly neighborhood Ace Hardware:

And zeroed in on Passion Plum:

As a “welcome to our new home” gift, Kate had bought me an orbital sander (#romance!) I was SUPER. PUMPED. about using it. And one sunny weekend morning I dragged the vanity outside on the back patio, threw down a dropcloth, and Went At It.

In the past when I really wanted to get off all the old finish on something and make sure the new stuff adhered well, I stripped the piece with CitriStrip, but I didn’t feel like that was really warranted here. I’m pretty sure the red was probably chalk paint, so I didn’t worry too much about getting it back to bare wood. I used the sander on the flat surfaces and a sanding block to tackle the curved legs and crevices, and at a certain point I called it good enough for government work and moved on. I also went over and checked the joints and ended up gluing / renailing a joint that was coming loose, but otherwise it was in pretty solid shape.

I used Benjamin Moore’s Advance Interior paint, a latex alkyd that works really nicely on working surfaces like furniture and cabinets, in a high-gloss finish. My mother taught me never to cheap out on paint and she was totally right.

The first coat, all told, took about 45 min. The friendly neighborhood Ace Hardware paint department guy had forewarned me that this paint tends to look super streaky and weird as it goes on, but if you’re patient and let it level out without overworking it, it turns out fine. My paint guy, like my mother, was totally right.

The paint can recommends you wait 16 hours between coats, so I let it hang out on the patio drying and did the second coat the next day.

Drumroll please!

Behold the vanity in its new home:

Now all we need to do is figure out what color to paint the closet walls.