Pinterest Project #7 - Painted Nightstands
Well, I finally finished Pinterest Project #7, my painted nightstands. Actually, only one of them is done. The other one is still unfinished in my garage. Fair warning: the picture quality in this post is a bit poor.
When we first moved into our house about one year ago, we didn't have a lot of furniture. We used large cardboard boxes turned on their sides as nightstands. It held an alarm clock and a can of Coke that my husband liked to take a few drinks of before bed. When the alarm went off the next morning, my husband reached over to slam his hand down on the snooze button, and the box collapsed onto itself! Coke splashed everywhere and the alarm clock dangled by its cord. Needless to say there was no snoozing that morning!
So when I found these end tables/shelves on Craigslist for only 5 bucks each, I knew right away that they would be transformed into our long-awaited nightstands!
Here they are in my kitchen, ready for a good cleaning before getting started:
When we first moved into our house about one year ago, we didn't have a lot of furniture. We used large cardboard boxes turned on their sides as nightstands. It held an alarm clock and a can of Coke that my husband liked to take a few drinks of before bed. When the alarm went off the next morning, my husband reached over to slam his hand down on the snooze button, and the box collapsed onto itself! Coke splashed everywhere and the alarm clock dangled by its cord. Needless to say there was no snoozing that morning!
So when I found these end tables/shelves on Craigslist for only 5 bucks each, I knew right away that they would be transformed into our long-awaited nightstands!
Here they are in my kitchen, ready for a good cleaning before getting started:
They were quite dirty and a little wobbly, so I cleaned them up and tightened the screws. After I got started painting the first one, I realized that it would be easier to unscrew all the pieces, paint them individually, and then put it back together again. 
As soon as I got halfway through the first coat, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the white paint brought out the detail on the sides.
After I got done painting all the pieces of the nightstands (two coats of Krylon White Gloss spray paint), I quickly painted the screws so they would match the white paint.
The plan was to paint them both white, and stencil a nice saying on top. That was not happening. I was just happy to get them painted and put back together! It took forever for me to paint because I kept having to wait between coats as well as rotate the pieces so everything got painted correctly. Three days, this project. I was not about to spend another hour trying to stencil a saying on top.
So I took the easy route. I had recently bought one of those wall-sticker sayings at Dollar Tree (they also sell them at Walmart for 97cents).
I cut the wall-sticker saying to fit and applied it on top of the nightstand. The finished project!
