Nightstands in Progress

As part of my plan to finally “finish off” the master bedroom (or at least get it to a good place), I’ve been meaning to refinish the nightstands for months and add new hardware. The plan was to repaint them with the classic and crisp bright white enamel (the one we’ve used throughout our house) because it stands up well to abuse and we had a can already on hand.

It was easy to get started - I sanded the whole thing and filled the dents with wood filler to smooth everything out. Once that dried I sanded things down again.

Getting them painted however was another story. For a while the problem was that every time we had a nice day, we either had fun plans or a more important project (like moving 3 cubic yards of mulch, building Oliver’s swing set or painting his play house). And then recently we’ve just had a lot of rainy days and passing thunderstorms that made it really hard to let things dry outside. It took a lot of patience - moving things outside and working, bringing them in again, over and over. Repainting spots that got damaged by a sweet kid who thought that hammering the nightstands with his toy wooden hammer was “helping” and “fixing” it. Wiping down and restaining the drawer fronts when a surprise sun shower came in faster than I could react. Repainting the big ding I made from trying to bring the nightstand in ahead of yet another storm… it went on and on.

I also devised a new plan for the drawer fronts. We decided that solid white night stands to replace our mismatched mahogany stained ones was a little too much white in the room. White trim, white doors, white dressers, white radiator cover, white shelf… vs. a mahogany headboard, a couple of wood picture frames and a chunky dark floor mirror. So I decided that we needed to bring a little wood stain into the nightstands. I looked around and fell in love with the look of small white dressers with wood stained drawers, so I decided to give that a try for the nightstands.

I tested everything out and I really like the way it comes together! Currently the nightstands are still curing, it’s been very humid in NJ these days so we need to leave extra time for the paint and stain to harden before use. I am excited to share the final results though when we set them up!