After a $54 Paint Makeover, This Nightstand Looks Designer on a Secondhand Budget
From IKEA hacks to wallpapered beauties to painted furniture, Apartment Therapy has seen a lot of inspiring nightstand makeover projects — and the latest is a completely cool cylindrical nightstand by Paulien De Clercq (@itsonthethirdfloor).
Paulien, who lives in Belgium, scored white nightstands for about $162 USD from a classifieds site called 2dehands, and she had a vision for the one that would go next to her bed. The nightstand originally came with tops that hung over the edges a bit, and she wanted to trim that down and give the nightstands a bold color. “I loved that it had a round shape, but it felt a bit ‘hospital’ to me,” she says. “I wanted to cut off the border and change the color and handles.”
A bit of woodworking slightly altered the shape of the nightstands.
Paulien was inspired by the popular Kartell nightstands; her design would just be a bit wider. She trimmed the overhang — you can see it here — off the top of the nightstands and drilled large holes in the drawers for new handles. “I was tempted to leave them open,” Paulien says on Instagram, but she ended up adding black circular pulls inside of the new drilled holes for a bit more contrast.
“Drilling the holes as ‘handles’ was actually easier than expected!” Paulien says. Her uncle, woodworker Arnold Bookelaar (@bookelaar.be), helped her trim off the overhang and drill the holes.
The nightstands got seven coats of green paint.
The trickiest part of the project was painting the nightstands the deep olive green (Dulux’s Shady Green) and getting good coverage. She sanded the furniture and used wood filler to patch up where the preexisting handles were and then painted.
Paulien initially considered orange paint for her nightstands, but in the end, she went with green, and it took seven coats. “I think it took me four layers before it started to look … decent,” she says on Instagram. She recommends investing in a higher-quality paint if you’re going to paint over laminate or lacquered furniture because she had to wait eight hours for each layer to dry. “I was a little scared for a second, but in the end, I love it,” Paulien adds.
“It gives me a Kartell vibe, which was the goal in the first place, and I feel like I really did a good job!” she says. (And she spent about $54 on paint to make it over.) “I’m very proud I saw the vision and gave the nightstands a second chance.”
Inspired? Submit your own project here.