How I Finally Got my Nightstand

When the hubs and I got married, he already had a fancy bedroom set that we now share. He had a bed, two dressers, and one nightstand. When he bought said bedroom set, he didn't think he needed a second...much to my sadness after we got married. I went a couple months without a night stand at all, and nearly lost my mind. You really take the ability to put a book or a drink right next to you for granted, until that ability is gone anyway. I snagged a $7 Lack side table from Ikea and stuck it next to my side of the bed, and that's how it's been since. It's not the same color and therefore doesn't match anything else in the room, but the much bigger issue is that those $7 don't buy you a drawer. Another thing you really take for granted is the ability to put something in a drawer. More than a year and multiple swaps in who gets what side of the bed (and therefore who has the real night stand and who has the dumb drawer-less one), and we finally settled into a firm and concreted ownership pattern, with hubs getting the drawer-less table. He didn't mind, and I didn't either. But in the back of my mind, I also wasn't going to turn down a potential "real" nightstand to replace the Ikea one with one day. At some point this summer, I found it. In my favorite antique shop, at a reduced price, I found this absolute beauty.

That's kind of how everything in my favorite antique shop looks: covered in a thousand other things that I want. Because it's a little hard to see under all that stuff, it's not very wide but is quite long, and has two large drop leaves (one on each side). It also, you might notice, has a drawer. I left it in the store, took hubs back the next day, and took her home for $50 to be my new nightstand. I was ecstatic...until about six minutes later when I realized that because it's not very wide, it would be a perfect side table for the end of the couch where hubs has been begging for a place to put a drink and/or remote. It's not a huge amount of space next to the couch there and most tables would cut off the entire walking path into the room, so we'd been on the lookout for something narrow. And this table was narrow. I pulled up my big girl pants and gave hubs my new nightstand so he could have an end table.

(Sorry for the weird colors in that photo...it was really dark and I had to do some editing.) It fit really nicely, but you better believe I've been on the lookout for a replacement ever since so I can have my nightstand. Months passed, and I really didn't have any options (or available money in the budget). I'd all but given up for the foreseeable future until I had a brain wave one day that nearly knocked me over. I had a bar stool. A bar stool I'd been meaning to paint. A bar stool we bought in the middle of July and I never got around to doing anything with. Remember this Instagram photo?

Yup. The one on the left was one I painted in college and love, and the one on the right was picked up in a thrift store this summer for the purpose of also painting. (The rooster's not really my style.) I went back and forth and couldn't decide what I was going to paint on it, and then did decide but never made time to actually paint it. So it's been sitting in our extra room since...until it hit me. Bar stools are narrow. Bar stools are reasonably stable and won't be knocked over by a rambunctious Captain. Bar stools provide just enough table space for a drink AND a remote. A 500 word, rambling text message to hubs later, and we were on our way to getting me my nightstand back!

The first step was to sand all that green off. This is the part where I'm super thankful for the man I married, because he knows how lazy I am when it comes to important steps like this, and he knew that I would want to skip it. I totally could have painted over it...it just would have taken about seven coats. So he volunteered to - and insisted on - sanding it all down and getting it ready for me.

My photo skills are lacking, and I didn't feel the need to get a shot that didn't also include my own shadow, but hey, you can see how great a job he did. In the end, there was still some finicky green showing but it was almost all gone and I was ready to start painting. $7 of paint later, and this is the finished product.

In that second picture there, you can see why it was so important to find a narrow table that wouldn't block the entire walking path. And this guy delivers! We went with the beige because it matches a lot of the colors in the room (the stone fireplace, the huge map covering the wall above the couch, the future curtains we will one day hang...) and the shade of red we picked was inspired by both our brick house/fireplace and a table we had seen at that same antique store that we wanted to work but wouldn't have been sturdy enough. It looks great next to the couch, and complements the green wall color without making it too Christmasey.

And yes, I got my nightstand!

Other than the ugly cord conglomeration that needs desperately to be hidden, I'm in love with my new nightstand. And the extra space on that wall let me move a dog bed from the dining room (where I never really wanted it to be) and into our room.

So that's it! The night stand was $50 (in August), the bar stool was about $20 (in July), and the paint was $7 (last week). Because it was all spread out though, I like to just believe that I got a new nightstand and end table for the cost of the paint. And I'm going to stick with that.