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Whoops, having to make a few modifications. You've got to think about these built-ins.
I'll show you what I mean. They say an eco-friendly house can't be built in 150 days for $150,000,
and I say it can. I'm Allen Smith, join me as I push the limits with time, budget and
creativity with the Garden Home Challenge, exclusively on eHow Home. When I'm building
a house, I try to keep the rooms as flexible as possible -- so I limit the built-ins. And
what I mean by built-in, would be like, vanities in a bathroom -- let's just take that for
an example. I always try to maximize the placement of that. For instance, in this bathroom here,
it's on axis with this long hall. So if you look down the hall, what I didn't want to
see was the commode. I wanted to see the vanity, because above the vanity, while it's very
small, will have a mirror above it. And I hope that the mirror will come up to this
point where the ceiling angles back. And when you look down this hall, into this room, this
mirror will help make the entire space feel more expansive. Now, this is a very inexpensive
vanity. It costs about 65 bucks. And what we did is we actually had some leftover maple
butcher block from the kitchen -- so we're gonna use that for the top of the vanity,
and we're gonna do a drop-in white porcelain sink. You know, I had visions of finding a
piece of furniture, that I could paint, that would be really cool and different, but I
could never find anything that really came up high enough. It was gonna require so much
modification. When I found this vanity for $65, which included the drawers and the doors
--which are being painted now-- I thought, gosh, we just need to go with this. So in
here, you can see, the water source coming through as well as the drain there. Now, there's
not a lot of storage here, and that's why I did this built-in just to the right. If
you're facing the vanity with a shelf, it protrudes in to what would be this lost space.
So that shelf will be placed to put toiletries and also be a place to stack towels and that
sorta thing. And it's just next to the linen closest, which is just outside this door.
So you get an idea of the flow of the house. And why don't we go downstairs to the master
bathroom -- let me show you what we're doing with the vanity there. So what we have here
is double vanity that's gonna go in here. I went with another inexpensive pre-made vanity.
And I'm gonna modify it, and we'll talk about that later. But let's walk in here: You'll
see why I had to go with an inexpensive vanity. I made a little bit of a mistake: What I had
was a single sink here in this vanity. The commode is over here, so there was plenty
of room for us to actually have a double sink. And we had it already stubbed up here -- everything
was great. And then I said, well, why don't we go for two, I think it would actually look
better and function better in this bedroom. So this is the original plumbing, and this
is something to keep in mind if you're thinking about adding an extra sink and a larger vanity
in a preexisting home: What we did is we just extended the water lines over here, for hot
and cold, and we extended the drain over here, so both of the sinks will drain. So it really
wasn't that big of a deal, but we did have to cut out Tony's beautiful work here on the
wall with these boards. But we'll just pack the insulation back, Tony will put the boards
back, we'll paint them -- and hey, the vanity goes up against this anyway. So it's all gonna
work out. We got a larger vanity. We'll have a couple of mirrors. We'll make this room
feel bigger. I'm liken' where it's goin'. Hey, if you're enjoying watching these updates
on our little house, check in regularly, tell a friend about it, and subscribe to eHow Home.