DIY In Progress

I’ve done quite a few little DIY’s before but this is my first official real DIY. I’ve wanted to re-finish a piece of furniture for quite a while. I bought a small nightstand for our spare room off a girl who had a garage full of furniture in the spring. She was painting and selling it all as a side project. I realized I could do it myself and pretty easily. Plus, if I didn’t myself it would be more to my taste. (The hardware she chose wasn’t a nice looking as it had been online).  We were given A LOT of furniture when we got the house last fall. Brad’s parents were amazingly generous and actually gave us some of my favourite pieces of furniture that we own. Other pieces we were given by family and friends aren’t so much… to my taste. Basically, a lot of it is stuff people wanted to get rid of. So now we have a basement full of “extra” furniture that I choose see as DIY opportunities waiting to happen. Thanks, Pinterest.

One piece we were given is a solid wood TV stand. This stand, like most TV stands you see for sale on Kijiji, is a nice, and probably expensive, piece of furniture that was built to hold the old boxy style of TVs. We split it in half and put our flat screen on top of the bottom portion and I took other half to paint and refurbish.  Unfortunately, I started this DIY quite a while ago, way before the blog, so there are no “before” pictures. However, I am going to use the bottom as my stand-in “before”.

I started by sanding down the entire stand. Then, I sanded. I sanded by hand which might not be the most effective method but I don’t have hand held sander and this piece has intricate detailing on the front that you need to get into with a regular old piece of sand paper anyway. I did my best to really sand it down well. Whatever that means.

Next I primed it and let it dry. I then promptly forgot all about the project.

When I was shopping in cottage country at my favourite little store I found two emerald green glass knobs that I fell in love with for $9.99/ea. I love small, touristy towns in the summer. They have the best finds. At the same store I got two local, handmade pottery pieces, a soap dish and a cup, for under $20.00 for both. Amazing!

Two weeks ago I decided I would finish the project so I could make use of my emerald green knobs. Emerald is in, after all. I put two coats of antique white paint on and it covered nicely. I attached my knobs and re-drilled the two shelves that I had removed to paint. The last step will be to find a new back to put on as the one that was attached previously was a crappy piece of plywood. Don’t ask me why they wouldn’t finish the entire thing in real wood. I’d like to put some wallpaper at the back to add some visual interest to the interior of the shelf.