Bedside Tables

In our bedroom in Alexandria, we didn’t have any room for nightstands or bedside tables, but in our new house in Charlottesville the rooms are all very generously sized and we decided to get some!

Here’s a pic of our bed in our new bedroom: very obviously lacking bedside tables. 

We’ve kind of been using an end table that matches another one we have in our family room as a temporary bedside table but it’s not really cutting it.  (Side note: Notice there is NO MORE WALLPAPER!  We still haven’t painted the drywall in our bedroom yet but for not it’s totally fine.)

The problem is we have budgeted $600 total to decorate the bedroom (including paint, which we haven’t picked out yet, and the new rug, which we just bought on sale from Joss & Main for $200) so I didn’t want to spend more than $100 total on the bedside tables.

After searching thrift/ consignment shops, I was disappointed with the selection available in my price range… so I decided to check out what’s apparently become my new favorite source for everything home: IKEA.  Sure enough, they had bedside tables in our budget– only $39 a piece!

The two tables arrived unassembled so we laid them out and started priming them.

(We just used leftover primer from our kitchen cabinets.)

We then swung by Benjamin Moore and got some samples of their paint– you know, the tiny little containers that are only a few dollars each?  We got a pretty blue that I thought would look good with the color scheme in our room.  First we painted everything blue and then we assembled the tables.

After they were assembled, I didn’t like the way the blue looked– so middle school boy’s room.

So we decided to paint OVER the blue using (another sample) a dark green paint that I had been considering for our shutters outside.  I decided I wanted the blue to peek through the dark green before we painted, we actually slathered on some Vaseline first!  The theory behind this was to create kind of like a lotto ticket scratch where the paint over the Vaseline would come off really easily, revealing the blue underneath.

Finally, once the Vaseline was on and the dark green paint had dried on top of that, we started sanding away.  The dark green came off pretty easily where there was Vaseline but it took some extra sanding where there wasn’t, which was a messy, organic distressed look I was hoping to create.

I got these knobs from World Market back in November (as a set of two for $8 I think) but unfortunately they no longer sell them anymore.

Here’s the finished product(s) in our bedroom!

Total price breakdown:

$39 for the IKEA unpainted bedside table

$5 for the blue paint (already had the primer and green sample paint for the shutters)

$4 for the knob

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$48 per bedside table

Not bad at all for the price!  Now I’ve got $300 to finish the rest of the room… 🙂