time to sink some money into the houses

i don't know if i ever mentioned that i am the landlord of two rental houses. the tenants in one of my houses just gave notice and they will be moving out this month, which means that i need to find some new renters. i put ads up all over and actually have a showing tomorrow, so that's great! anyhow, the house is old and a lot of the stuff in it isn't very nice, so we decided that we're going to put some money into it and make it a nicer place to live for the new tenants. here is what we need to do:

• replace carpet in 2 bedrooms and the basement


• paint every room


• install new ceiling light fixtures in bedrooms


• replace bathroom tile, toilet, vanity, mirror, and light fixture in both bathrooms


• repair showers in both bathrooms


• re-tile kitchen floor, install garbage disposal

it's a lot, but we're going to do it now and are looking at it like a practice house-flip. today we went shopping and found the carpet and light fixtures. the carpet place had remnants and we were able to find two matching high quality carpet pieces for the bedrooms. the basement is a different carpet, but the guy gave us a $0.50/sq ft discount. we also paid for installation, because we have no idea how to do it. total for ~400 sq feet of carpet + installation: $777

then we went next door to the lighting place that is moving and having a huge 20%-60% off sale. we bought 2 bathroom light fixtures and the 2 bedroom light fixtures. they were 20% and 40% off and we only paid $110! they would have been well over $200 at home depot, so i think we got a good deal.

i've been looking on craigslist, and between that and the habitat for humanity thrift store, i think we can get the bathroom vanities, cabinets, sinks, toilets, tile etc for pretty cheap.

then i started thinking.. you know, i really don't like the vanity, sink, and cabinet in my bathroom... so i suggested to j that we take those out and put them in the rental house.. then we can get nice ones for us! we might be spending more now than we would just buying cheap ones, BUT we've been wanting to replace ours anyway and now we won't have to buy other ones for one of the bathrooms. he thought that was a good idea, as long as we could find something we liked that was reasonably priced. we want one of those vessel sinks and cabinetry in a dark wood finish.

they are not reasonably priced.

here's an example of one i like.

$665! and that's just for the base.. it doesn't even include the sink.

to make matters more difficult, our bathroom is so tiny that the vanity can't be deeper than 15". that's not very big (standard is 22"). so what i would like to do is find a 15" x 30" cabinet in a dark wood with some drawers or storage space and then drill the holes to install a vessel sink (~$100 for a new one on craigslist) and faucet.

how do i do an internet search for that? i can't figure out what it would be called.. i've tried vanity base, cabinet, and a few other things. i'm not finding what i want. any ideas?

i could always do a pedistal sink, but we have limited storage as it is, so i wanted to avoid that option.

j is planning to take a woodworking class next year. i can't wait until he can just MAKE us what we want.