The Dreaded Nightstands

When Tim and I first got married we found some great furniture at a consignment store called J&K. Included in our purchases were two matching nightstands that were blue and surely intended for a child's room. We decided that we would buy them and paint them black. And so we did...and we did a terrible job. Seriously!! Not only was the paint kind of rubbery and sticky from the get go, once dried and put inside, everything we set on it stuck to the paint. It was a disaster. So within a week of painting the nightstands the job of re-painting the nightstands went on our "to do" list. And four years later we have finally gotten around to it.....Yeah!!! These were a high priority on our bucket list.

It took me forever to choose a color. I decided to go with gray. I know that it is very trendy and I feel like that is for good reason. It's such a great color! And minus that fact that you can see brush strokes and they're not as smooth as I was anticipating, I am pretty happy with the way they turned out. We made the mistake of painting them in direct sunlight on a fairly warm San Diego day and I think the heat made them dry too fast as we painted, but live and learn :)

 Before

 After Sanding

Tim hard at work 

 Oliver hard at work

 Painting in action

Supplies

 After

With Knobs

Anyway, a quick overview of what went down. Tim sanded the living daylights out of the suckers. He did an awesome job. We wanted to get through the yucky black and primmer that we put on and then through some of the original blue. He started with using an 80 grit sandpaper and then switched to a 60 grit to speed  up the process. We painted two coats of an oil based primer (Kilz brand). And then after letting it dry for 24 hours (we didn't want to risk it still being wet) we painted two coats of a beautiful gray (cement gray by Behr...semi-gloss latex paint). And then the next day we topped it off with two coats of Miniwax Polycrilic top coat. They are definitely shinny and I think the top coat really made all of the difference. We went to Cost Plus World Market and found some cute knobs. Overall I am pretty happy with how they turned out. This little project definitely proved that I am not too excited about re-doing furniture. It's pretty time consuming and definitely takes a lot of patience.