This is the second of two bathrooms in our small 1,100 square foot home. Both our bathrooms are quite small, so a large focus of the remodel was to make it appear larger than it really is. For the design of the vanity, that meant mouunting it on the wall, eliminating any protruding drawer pulls, and keeping it's overall size as compact as possible to free up the available open space in the rest of the bathroom.

As with most of my projects, I started in SketchUp to work out the overall dimensions of the casework and layout the drawer / door arrangement. With that done, I quickly threw together the carcass for the vanity using simple pocket screw and screw joinery. Nothing fancy here at all. The case went together so quickly that I didn't even stop to take any progress pictures, so best I can give you is this photo of the carcass installed on the wall:

The vanity is mounted to the wall using a french cleat, with a few lag bolts across the cleat and on the side of the cabinet to firmly affix it to the wall. Because the walls were completely tiled, it was important for us to make sure we clearly marked the stud locations on the wall (you can see the yellow tape marking them in the image above) and we had to predrill through the tile before we could drive the lag bolts. Additionally, since the cabinet on the right side of the vanity is so small, I had to purchase a right angle drill to be able to properly get in and drill the pilot holes through the tiles.

Next up were the drawers. Since the sink drain plumbing sits behind the drawers, I opted to simply make the drawers fit in front of the plumbing. That left me with about 10" of depth for the drawers. The drawer boxes are made from pre-finished 1/2" Baltic Birch plywood and mounted using 10" Knape & Vogt undermount slides.

The last portion of the build was the drawer fronts and doors. I opted to use veneer for the drawers and doors for a few of reasons:

• I wanted continuous grain across the entire front of the vanity, and it would be very difficult to find a solid board wide enough.
• To ensure the door never warps since it's a frameless design
• I wanted to use figured walnut to really make a visual statement, and veneer is much cheaper and easier to obtain.

One challenge with using veneer along with recessed drawer pulls is the substrate would be exposed. To prevent this, I carefully measured where each pull would be located, and replaced the MDF with a small block of solid walnut in each of those sections. I also placed solid walnut edge banding between the substrate panels. Doing the edge banding before veneering gives you a nearly seamless look that is almost completely indistinguishable from solid wood.

With veneering out of the way, it's time to route out the drawer pulls. I had to buy a specialized drawer-pull bit to get the profile I wanted. I ended up going with the Whiteside 6024 Drawer Pull bit.

I threw together a simple jig in the profile of the hand holds that I wanted. I had to make it reversible so that I would be able to route out both the left and right sides of the pulls. To route the profile, I first removed the bulk of the material with a straight bit, then for the final pass, used the drawer pull bit to give the profile.

Last up is finishing. As with just about every project I build, I went with a simple satin wipe-on-poly. I opted for 4 coats, sanding between each and finishing with a polish using #0000 steel wool.

To install the drawer fronts, I decided to use blum drawer front adjusters. These are small plastic discs that you recess into the back of the drawer front and give you just enough play during installation to get everything aligned perfectly. They make the installation process much easier than trying to use shims and clamps to install the fronts. Once you have everything positioned where you want it, just tighten down the screws and drive a couple extra to lock everything in place.
The cabinet door is installed using euro cup hinges, so a couple 35mm holes drilled per the manufacturers instructions were all that's needed for that. To prevent the door from hitting the wall when opening, I installed hinge restrictors to limit the door travel to 86 degrees instead of 110 degrees.

Here it is all complete and assembled: