The Landlord Store

A friend of ours, Mary Ellen, came over to our house not long after we bought it to check out our disaster area. She pointed to some especially cheap, ugly tile the previous owners had chosen, and said, "that's from the landlord store." She explained that somewhere in Gowanus or South Williamsburg or somewhere, there's a big warehouse full of piles of crappy stuff: ugly light fixtures, MDF cabinetry, those leaky fake chrome faucets with the clear plastic knobs, laminate flooring...you get the idea. And that's where all the landlords go to get cheap, ugly, crappy stuff to put in their tenants' apartments.

(Turns out the landlord store is actually south of Red Hook, and it's called Home Depot. Who knew.)

"Landlord Store" has become our shorthand for anything that looks cheap and badly made. When we set out to find a vanity to put in the garden level half-bath, we were hoping to find something that wasn't landlord store. We tried Green Demolitions, where we found our master bath vanity (we posted about that HERE), but had less luck this time around (though we did get to spend three really enjoyable hours in NJ traffic). We tried finding salvaged countertop to put together with a salvaged sink basin we knew we could get. Turns out the industry term for a piece of salvaged counter large enough to cut a vanity top out of is "full price." We priced out new materials. We veered briefly into pedestal sink territory, which turned out not to work because the plumbing had been installed for a vanity. Nothing we tried got us a bathroom sink for less than $500. So it was off to the landlord store this morning.



This is what we came up with. It cost $125, and is 100% landlord store. We have a fiendish plot though. The panels are shaker. Our brilliant idea is to fill the panel depressions in with something beautiful - maybe laminate some handmade paper in there and cover it with thick poly? Maybe tile it? (We learned when we were in Mexico for my sister's wedding that there is virtually no surface that can't be tiled. And we're good at tiling, so we're going to keep doing it.) Anyway, we have high hopes that with a little bit of artsy-fartsy-ness, we can de-landlord-store this vanity and stay on budget, both at the same time.