I love taking things that nobody wants and giving them a fresh look and possibly a new home. This is why I actually like to work with laminate furniture – you don’t have to worry about ruining a good wood piece and you can really play with it. I found this nightstand / end table on Facebook Marketplace for $5 and knew I had to do something with it to make it beautiful. It had good simple straight lines and was solid, but the colors and condition wasn’t great. I used the Pinterest pin on the right to be my inspiration for this project.
It also was longer on one side with three large holes in them like it one time connected with some other pieces of furniture
Prep
The first thing I did was sand it down to remove some of the finish and give it a smooth base to paint. There was some water damage on the top and bottom shelf so I sanded those carefully to smooth them out again.
Then I took the whole nightstand apart (legs, bottom shelf, and drawer removed) so I could paint them individually.
Then I carefully cut the longer side to make it even and to get rid of the holes with a circular saw. This was a big improvement.
Paint/Sealing
I chose two different colors of chalk paint – Serenity Blue by Rustoleum and Plain White by Waverly.
I painted the base of the of table Serenity Blue and even painted the bottom of the base since the red/blue laminate was used throughout. I wanted the new owner to never see the old laminate color.
Then I painted the top and sides of the top white as well as the inside/outside of the drawer and bottom shelf. Once I had several coats on it, I put it all back together and then sealed with 4 coats of water based Polycrylic from Miniwax. After that was dry, I replaced the drawer pull/hardware and we have a much happier little nightstand.
