Yup. Twenty bucks. For the pair. Of course, once we bought paint for ‘em it ended up costing us a bit more than $10 each…but not by much.
Let me back up a bit.
A few weekends ago, Corey and I had some friends in town, and on our way back from grabbing breakfast at our favorite breakfast taco place, we spotted a garage sale a few houses down from us. My friend, Audrey, and I quickly decided that we needed to visit it – just in case there was something fabulous – so we sent our husbands back to the house and walked over to check it out.
Immediately upon walking up to the driveway, I spotted my treasure.
Love! I quickly snapped the above photo with my iPhone and rushed back to the house to show Corey/beg him to let me get them. He wasn’t convinced (he doesn’t quite have the vision I do when it comes to these things), but I argued that for $10 each, if we decided we hated them we could probably make money by re-selling them on Craigslist.
Audrey and I headed back to the garage sale, and even though the lady running it was very unsure about letting the nightstands go without the matching lamps (because apparently without something to set them on, the horribly ugly lamps were useless to her?) but I convinced her that I really didn’t need the lamps and I was suddenly the proud owner of two new $10-a-pop nightstands!
Once we got the nightstands home, they sat in our living room for about a week before we actually did anything to them. Once they had been sitting around clogging up our entryway for a week, I grabbed one of them and brought it upstairs to make sure I liked it in the room. These guys are much smaller than the nightstands we presently have in the room, so I wanted to live with it for a few days to make sure the smaller size wouldn’t drive me crazy.
I plopped one into place next to our bed, stepped back, and fell in love.
Gorgeous! Corey had been worried that the style would clash with our mid-century dressers, but I reminded him that these are almost a perfect match to the bench at the foot of our bed, and they’d be the perfect way to tie that bench in and add a bit more of a thrown-together look to our room, without looking silly next to anything else.
Thank goodness I knew what I was talking about.
Even though Corey still wasn’t 100% convinced, he couldn’t argue that these looked way better than the previous nightstands had.
Huge improvement, yes?
As much as I actually loved the finish that was already on the nightstands, Corey and I are really trying to get away from wood tones in our bedroom. We have the dressers that we would never dream of changing from their beautiful wood finish, and we’ll eventually have wood flooring in there, so we want to mix it up a bit.
Almost as soon as we bought the nightstands I knew exactly what I wanted to do with them. Of course, I wanted to live with the nightstand by my bed for a few days to make sure I really liked it. A few days turned into a few weeks, and before I knew it we’ve had these crazy nightstands for almost a month and we hadn’t touched them – until this weekend.
Before I start sharing, I feel like I should warn you that this project is still a work in progress. I don’t have finished photos for you today. They’re currently out in our workshop drying so that I can put the finishing coat on them and I still need to figure out exactly what I’m doing with the drawer pulls. But, I was so excited to share how they’re looking so far that I couldn’t wait to share them!
We started off the way we start any of these projects – sanding, sanding, sanding!
And then it was time for the fun part.
Can I go on a bit of a side tangent here?
I am not a fan of this new can design for Rustoleum. I’ve heard a ton of people sing it’s praises, and I’ll admit that the new design allows for a much more even mist of paint, but oh em gee it is messy! Because the new stream of paint is less concentrated and more spread out (which is awesome for a nice, thin coat), it seems to just take off around the room and hit every available surface. By the time I got one coat on the nightstands, my shoes were already sticking to the ground because it was so coated in paint. I usually never get paint on myself when I’m spray painting, but I had a flip-flop outline on my feet, my arms were completely coated…hell, I even found spray paint up my nose, y’all. It was ugly.
So, long story short: new cans = more even coverage…of everything within a 100 ft radius.
Even though I was covered in paint, all that really mattered to me was that my tables were getting covered too!
One coat in…
This is a good example of what a “light coat” should look like. It feels like you’re not actually accomplishing anything at first, but if you take it slow you’ll end up with a much smoother surface in the end!
Two coats in…
And like magic, on the third coat they start to look beautiful.
Once I had them nice and shiny white, it was time for the part I was super excited about.
It involved a little of this…
A bit of this…
And one very pretty blue color.
I hate to be a tease, but this is where I have to leave off! The paint is drying right now, and hopefully I’ll be able to put the finishing touches on it tomorrow. I have a very good feeling about these nightstands, and I can’t wait to see how they end up looking in the room!
Any guesses as to what my plans for the blue paint are? Have you ever found something at a garage sale that your spouse just didn’t understand? How’d you make them see the light?