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When we moved into this house, we were met with a “move-in ready” home, which was great! However, because major repairs weren’t needed, we were able to do more cosmetic updates to enhance the look of our home and to make it our own.

We were able to upgrade many different things, which will will be shared in upcoming posts, so stay tuned.

One room that left us a little less than enthused was our upstairs bedroom. It had okay colors, but was updated in a way that seemed to obviously DIY, if you know what I mean.

Here’s a picture of what the bathroom looked like when we first bought the house.

I could have lived with the blue, but man I could not get behind the yellow sink and guess what?? The tub was yellow too.. ew.

Turns out they painted an oil-based paint onto the tiles in the bathroom and turned them blue.

So we decided to do some updates – you can see the full post on how we updated the bathroom here, but as a spoiler – here is the finished look before we recently updated the vanity. We scraped all the old paint and updated the tiles with a white tub and tile epoxy paint. This also transformed the sink and tub!

So this was taken shortly after we applied the epoxy paint and it had set. Notice how white and beautiful it looks… well let’s just say the tile on the walls still looks awesome, but the vanity didn’t last as well after a year and a half.

Especially the sink – the metal drain was peeling the epoxy from repeated water exposure and it was just seriously time for an update. The built in drawers didn’t hold much and the cabinets had a dumb shelf in the middle that prevented bottles from standing up. Annoying.

Honestly, we probably could have lived with it, but we figured with this extra time at home this year and a little extra money in the bank – it seemed like a good time to tackle that project. Plus the nice blue candle left a blue ring on the vanity and my makeup bag left a smudge.. it was time.

So let’s get to the good stuff! How did we remove this BUILT IN vanity??

I have to admit, I don’t think I fully understood that the vanity was completely built in before we decided to tackle this task. We knew it had tile on top and it connected right with the tile on the wall, but what we didn’t realize was that it was also made with CONCRETE! So that was a fun surprise!

At first we thought we could just basically cut the whole thing out, but it wasn’t that easy unfortunately. Lucas started by peeling away the front tiles and trying to pry as much of the vanity away from the wall as he could. This honestly didn’t get us very far so cue the sledge hammer!

So after the sledge hammer did the dirty work in breaking up the tile on the vanity, fortunately the wall tiles didn’t suffer any casualties except the corners had a crack, but we can easily touch that up with the tub and tile epoxy touch up kit.

Once the tile and concrete was broken up, we got our hands dirty and hand removed all the tile and concrete. We put it in a bucket little by little, ripped out the mesh rebar holding it together, and after using the shop vac to remove all the remnants, we were left with just wood to remove. I definitely recommend wearing work gloves because there were exposed nails and that rebar is no joke.

All we had to do next was go in with a crowbar and get all that wood pulled away from the wall and demoed. We’ve never had to do quite this much demo on a project, it was fun!

Once all the concrete, tile, and wood was removed we were left with an empty hole.

In order to finish the job, we had to figure out how to make the floor more level. Sadly, because the vanity was built in, when we removed it, we were left with sub floor and concrete. So we measured the difference in floor height and fortunately, we only needed to add some 2x4s to level it out. Also, we were fortunate because the vanity we purchased had levelers so the floor didn’t have to be perfect.

So after Lucas put up some drywall and plaster, we were ready to put the new vanity in!

Once we carried that vanity up the stairs and put it in place, Lucas went to work on hooking up all the piping – which required a Home Depot run or two haha and then we were in business!

I absolutely LOVE the new vanity, it is awesome! It has elevated our bathroom tremendously and now future owners of this home can decide if they want a different vanity for some reason, but I doubt they will!

When we were looking to do this project, I found NOTHING on removing a built in tile vanity, so I hope this helps you if you’re looking to do a similar project and gives you hope that you can transform your bathroom and it doesn’t have to be a total gut job!

ps. I do want to mention that there are cut outs left in our wall from where the old vanity was embedded into the wall, however the new vanity covered those cutouts and they don’t affect the look of the bathroom. I thought it would be worth noting in case this is something that would bother you.

Also if you’re interested, this particular vanity came from Lowe’s.

Thanks for reading and here’s a cute picture of my little Pommy Sophie to brighten your day!