Refinishing Nightstand

Today my BFF arrives from WA state to spend 8 days with me toodling around the South. This person has been my best friend since 8th grade; we have psychic moments, she's my best brainstorming buddy, and aside from Chris she probably knows me better than anyone in the world.

I wanted to make her the most kickass guest bedroom ever.

And, well, I may not have quite accomplished that, but we did manage to throw together a pretty cool room. Part of what we needed was a new nightstand. After refinishing the office into a bedroom, painting the white walls gray, removing the old wood trim and installing white trim, purchasing orange curtains and a beautiful white bedspread, there was no way I was going to use a dated, wooden, shellacqued nightstand in the new room.

Being pretty handy with a sander, and utilizing leftover paint, I turned this:

into this!

It has a white exterior and teal interior, which I filled with Burts Bees products because I'm the best hostess ever.

(also, clearly I have a thing for teal chevrons. See: this blog design)

Process: Despite crippling bouts of exhaustion and apathy (from cleaning), I used a sander on most of the surfaces, and sanded by hand the areas where the sander wouldn't fit. I'll be honest, the hand sanding really, really sucked. This was definitely not a project where I meditated while enjoying being creative and gracefully handling the work with poise. Instead I was having flashbacks to the summer where I stripped, sanded, and painted all my kitchen cabinets BY MYSELF.

Let's just say a future in flipping furniture is definitely not for me.

Ideally I wanted to use 3 grades of sandpaper, but due to time constraints and general hate for sanding wood (see above about refinishing kitchen cabinets), instead I used a 60 grit to get the shellaq off, then a 220 for smoothing.

You'll notice we kept the original hardware, which I suspected would look out of place, but actually turned out really cool. Definitely got lucky there.

Shout out to Jessi for the inspiration to paint the inside a different color. I was originally going to stick with all white, but after her suggestion used the same teal I have in my living room on the inside, for a perfect match with the teal accents in the room. You go, girl!

Up Next

I'll share how the entire guest bedroom turned out, and hopefully have less of an attitude about it. Whatever. Seriously you guys, I loathed this project. You're welcome.

<3, Savannah