This Bathroom DIY Almost Undid Designer Rebecca Atwood — Here’s What She Learned

Decorating with thrifted and salvaged home goods is more than a trend; it’s a movement that I’m 100% behind. Secondhand shopping — for vintage tins, one-of-a-kind wall decor, antique wicker, and more — lightens your footprint and makes your home more personal. Charleston, South Carolina-based painter and textile designer Rebecca Atwood is a proponent of it, too. 

Atwood has recovered all kinds of furniture in her collections and for her own home. So when she was redoing the powder room in her house, she didn’t hesitate to buy a salvaged sink. Installing it, as it turns out, though, is a much more complicated project than reupholstery.

“We lived without a sink in there for about a year until I got it figured out,” says Atwood, whose third book, The Harmonious Home: Designing Peaceful, Personal Spaces Inspired By Nature, just came out. Her family of four spent that year washing their hands in the kitchen until, at one point, that sink broke, too, she adds with a laugh. It was a comedy of errors she hopes she can help her fellow DIYers avoid — or at least mentally prepare for. 

“If you are fortunate enough to work with an interior designer, they can make all of this happen really beautifully for you, but if you’re doing it yourself, you may have some lessons along the way, and it may have to go at your own slower timeline,” says Atwood. Read on for her hard-won advice.

Atwood didn’t necessarily plan to change up the sink in her powder room. She had to remove the pedestal sink in there to install wallpaper (her Roses design). “It was only when we wallpapered, and I thought, Why would I put the white sink back in that room where everything’s so rich and purple? It just felt like the white really didn’t go,” the designer says. 

She had seen beautiful, colorful sinks in the work of Frances Merrill of Reath Design and others, which gave her the idea to look for a bold vintage option. She found the perfect deep purple mid-century one at an antique plumbing supply store upstate called The Period Bath Supply Company. (You can shop similar antique sinks on the brand’s website.)

“Because we had a pedestal sink before, no one had checked the wall to make sure it had the proper blocking for hanging something,” she says. “We were afraid we were going to have to open up the closet on the other side of the wall to put the blocking in. Luckily, we were able to hit studs right where they needed to be.” 

Atwood found finding a plumber tricky. “One thing that made it hard was that I didn’t have the bandwidth to keep calling different people to find a plumber,” Atwood says. It wasn’t that the sink was particularly heavy or complicated. A good plumber who is willing to do something outside their usual scope of work can be hard to find, especially if you’re not working directly with a designer or contractor who has one on their team.

The P trap is the pipe that goes from under your sink into the wall, and the most elegant ones are straight — not loopy. This doesn’t really matter when the plumbing is inside a cabinet or behind a sink skirt, but it does when you have a wall-mounted sink or an open console with visible plumbing. 

“I originally wanted it to look cleaner, straight down, but we didn’t have the height for that, so we had to do the loopy one,” Atwood says. Her plumber also told her that it was too risky to replace the rest of the components of the water line, so she had to settle for chrome, not brass. “For that, we were going to paint it with the gold paint you get for model planes because apparently that would work really well, but we never ended up doing it,” she says. “I just don’t even notice it now, but I probably will do it at some point.” 

Faucets are very specific. Everything has to match up seamlessly with your sink. Otherwise, at best, it’ll be surprisingly uncomfortable to use; at worst, your sink and faucet may be completely incompatible. 

Atwood thought she needed a wall-mounted faucet and had seen lots of options she liked; it turns out, though, she needed a shelf-mounted one. “There was only one fixture that worked for this particular sink,” she says. “It was a very basic-looking fixture, and it was only in chrome.” That wasn’t what she had pictured for her space, with its rich purple wallpaper and hammered brass sconces.

“I was just going to do the chrome faucet until we did get the plumber over,” she says. He told her it could be brass plated. Brass plating isn’t complicated or prohibitively expensive, and you can have any hardware, from vintage door hinges to door knobs to book ends, brass plated. (This is especially useful to know if you have an older home filled with antique hardware.) 

Problem, solved, and powder room, saved. To see more of Atwood’s home and get more of her design wisdom, including her favorite sources for vintage furniture, check out her new book.