Sometimes things change...

I got started restoring Isthmus House before it was even Isthmus House. When I put in the offer and it was accepted, I was ready to go with no place to go.

I already knew how bad the wood-paneled shower was and I had an idea of what I wanted to do with it. I really wanted to put in a dresser style vanity with a marble top – two things my mother “just happened to find” on Craigslist right when I needed them.

Now, of course, these things don’t exist in the wilds of Craigslist ready to go; you have to make them into something you want to feature in your bathroom.

So I took the cheap, real wood dresser and got started.

You can see the polyurethane that I started to sand off in this photo. It was so pretty as it returned to natural wood.

 

It took a long time to get into every crevice sanding. Due to some of the details in the woodwork, I had to do a decent part of it by hand to prevent a power sander from stripping off the character along with the dated polyurethane.

Eventally, though, I got to clean wood.   

 

But, since mold and mildew aren’t that appealing, you can’t have a bathroom vanity of raw wood and the stain and new, non-gross poly had to go on.

The first coat of stain took pretty well and wasn’t blotchy. The plan when I stained it was to lose the wood top altogether for a sink top so I didn’t stain it.

 

It took a few more coats of stain (letting them dry and soak in and never puddle) and a couple of poly before I was happy with the results but happy I ended up!

 

Once it was dry and moved into the new place, we threw the aforementioned Craiglist-find hunk of marble on it in the dining room and treated it as a sideboard while we were working on the wood-paneled shower bathroom.

That bathroom eventually received the pedestal sink I’ve shown here because of the expense of moving plumbing. Since we couldn’t use it in there any longer and, as you’ve probably heard me bemoan, there’s approximately 7 (I’m not exaggerating) square feet of counter space in our kitchen (we were using stools as countertops in the corner), we took a different route.

We eventually moved it into the kitchen as a makeshift island. It’s really been a lifesaver since, in case you're wondering, stools don’t make great countertops.

Here’s the final product in the kitchen:

 

Obviously, we love it – tonight we rolled out simple biscuits on it to go along with a super healthy chicken stew. Yay, untreated marble!

So that was the very first project for the House on the Isthmus. I wonder what the last will be?