New Bottoms, New Nightstand

Good evening, all! It's Sunday night which means I unfortunately have to go back to my day job tomorrow. Sunday's also start this horrible emotion that I like to call "Sunday Grumpies" which basically means, I've had such a fabulous weekend spending time with Hubs, doing some household crafts and furniture redo's (of course!), and thinking about how much I wish I could do all of this for a living. But hey, we all have to work, so back to the grind tomorrow!

Things have been a little crazy for Hub's and I lately. Busy busy! There have been weddings, trips, and life that have really been keeping us on the go! Oh, and we also decided to go to India to see a dear friend celebrate his wedding (coming soon to a post near you in December! Eeek!!). So, yes, I'm a little behind on the posts!

Okay, enough excuses as to why I haven't been posting. Let's get down to business! I had mentioned in  previous posts, Barn Wood Bench and A Vase and a Lamp Shade, that Hubs and I have a list of things we needed for our bedroom. Well guess what?! Today I finally get to cross everything off that list! We finally found the prefect nightstand to perform a little bit of Consigned Design magic on. Excited? I am!

Here's what we found:

Flea Market find: $100....minus $40 after a little bit of negotiating. This thing is ugly but it had great bones...well sort of. I'll get into that a little later.

First step was to get all of this ugly paint off of this poor piece of furniture. Little did we know how much paint was actually on this thing. LAYERS and layers. So, needless to say, this took a little a lot of elbow grease. I couldn't have done this without my friend, Paint Stripper. Actually, we used a spray on paint remover that worked great! You should be able to find this at any local home improvement store.

PLEASE be sure to use protective gloves, eye wear, and long sleeves to do this. If the wind catches any of this mist and gets on you, it will burn a little. This stuff is no joke. So please use with extreme caution. Also, do this in a well ventilated area, aka - outside, the smell is intense.

First, just spray the paint remover on like spray paint. Let it sit for about 5-10 minutes until the paint starts to bubble (be sure to read instructions on the can as well!). The longer you let this sit, the easier it is to scrape off the old paint. Then use a steel paint scraper and get to scrapping! It's best to work in small sections. I started with the drawers and then did the rest of the piece.

Since there was so much paint on this silly thing, we had no choice but to sand off all the excess. But, I still think it's a good idea to do just to make sure your surface is nice and smooth. We used 80 grit sand paper for this.

Ignore the gardening, I never said I had a green thumb!

Back to the bones: Here's a little reminder to you while you are out junkin' (definition - going into the most run down places that have piles of crap in them and dig for a gem) - be sure to look at your piece entirely. We made the mistake of only opening the top two drawers of this piece while at the flea market, but once we got it home we realized the bottom drawers were falling apart. So, we decided to go ahead and put new bottoms in all of the drawers. Hubs went out and got some fancy ply wood (yes, I said fancy) and made new bottoms for each of the drawers. They turned out great!

I really wish I had taken a before picture of these drawers. You would have been shocked to see what the bottoms of them looked like.

Next step, prime! This is when I think the piece really starts to look like a new.

Last are the finishing touches. You can really finish this up however you would like. We actually bought a piece of furniture (I know! It was the first piece of furniture that we had actually bought new in a long time. Ha!) that we loved the finish on so we were trying to match it. We used the same antique gray paint we had finished our Barn Wood Bench with. Remember - once you do a coat of paint, let it dry for 24 hours, sand it down, and paint it again. I always try to do this a few times. It takes A LOT of patience but it's worth the extra time and work. Once the painting was complete, I sanded some key parts of the nightstand to really give it an antiqued look. After I got it roughed up a bit, I used some glaze and dark stain to complete the look.

Oh, and I can't forget about the new hardware! The original "hardware" (if you can call it that) that was on this piece only needed one screw to get it secured into place. We wanted to switch this up so we covered the old holes with some wood filler. Then Hubs got the new hardware put on. Here's another reminder - always measure twice. Don't tell him I told you this but the bottom drawer's hardware is a little off....actually its way off...which is why the final pictures are taken at an angle. Ha! Hopefully you can't tell.

Finished product!

Cost of redo: Approximately $70

Total cost of nightstand: About $130

Alright - bed time. Night y'all! Stay safe.

KC

PS - I will upload a picture soon of the finished product in its new home. You'll love it!