LittleMrsOrganized

Alright, here we go…it’s week six and I’m posting week four and five and we’re just gonna move along and pretend like they weren’t majorly delayed 😉
A couple weeks ago I was spending most of my spare time working on our nightstands, as I was browsing through my DIY board on Pinterest trying to figure out what project I wanted to do that week I saw the pin that inspired my nightstands – how did it not occur to me that this was my project for the week?! So the bad news is that I failed to take a before photo, or any in progress for that matter…but it was much more successful than week three! Here’s a link to the DIY Network website where I found the idea, along with some good step by step directions.

So I began my search for the perfect table to slice in half…Salvation army, two Goodwills, several hours at the Peddlers Mall and I finally found a solid wood, square end table with a drawer — for $15!

After I measured and drew a straight line down the middle my husband took it out back, removed the drawer and cut the table in half. We thought about using some of the drawer track to build a shelf underneath but decided to cut it all out for now.

Then I got busy sanding…using a coarser grit and the electric sander along the tops and large flat surfaces, then a fine grit to sand along the edges and in the detailed areas by hand.

Next I sprayed the tables with several light coats of primer. Meanwhile I went back and forth on whether to spray or brush paint these things. Spray paint is one of my best friends in the whole world — but the color options can be really limited and I really wanted a light gray — oh but brush painting can be so time consuming — but more durable in the end — possibly with those streaky brush marks — but it can be done indoors — in the end I decided to just go for it and grab a brush, ok actually I grabbed a foam brush at first because I just really hate those brush marks, but that only lasted about 5 minutes before I realized I just had to use the paintbrush. Luckily, the Mr. had just bought a good brush for a little project he had been working on.

Two (tedious) coats of paint later and I realized that this light gray color was coming off as a weird off white, and a different weird off white than our walls! Since I had paid a little too much for a little quart of paint for a project that was supposed to be cheap, buying a darker color wasn’t an option. So I did the only logical thing to do…Okay, I didn’t exactly “freak out”, but still…Right away she said, “Squirt a little bit of black paint in there and mix it up.” — oh yeah, of course! Thanks mom 🙂 So, also at her suggestion, I poured a little of the light-off-white-gray into a plastic cup and began squeezing in black paint, stirred it up with a wooden skewer and it was perfect! So I went for it, added black paint to the quart little by little stirring very thoroughly — then stirred some more — and maybe a little more.

In the end I had four coats of paint on these things (two light-off-white-gray and two light gray) and they were just the color I had imagined. That handy man of mine built this mounting piece on each of the tables and “hung” them on the wall!It was a bit hard to get a photo that showed how this works…basically the square piece mounted on the underside of the table just notches into the piece mounted on the wall. Here’s a better view of what the piece on the wall looks like…The website where I found the original idea explains a different way of mounting but we wanted ours to be moveable for cleaning, making the bed etc.

Tags: cheap, DIY, nightstand, paint, table