Linen Map Nightstands

Oh boy am I excited to share these nightstands with all of you today! There's so much to say about them so I'm going to dive right in.

Let's start with where I got them. One of my fellow furniture painting vendors at Morgantown Market had these two nightstands in her booth upstairs. They aren't exactly the same, but they have enough similarities in shape to lend themselves to work well together as a pair. She had incredible prices on them, so I eagerly scooped them up and loaded them into The Marshmallow.

The taller nightstand had a very dark red stain on it while the shorter one had a yellow pine finish. I wanted to paint them in a light color because I thought that would work with most home decor in the homes of my customers, so that meant I would need to prime them.

First, I prep cleaned and sanded both of the nightstands according to General Finishes' recommendations. If you're unfamiliar with that process, you can watch the video on how to prep a piece with an existing finish below.

After the pieces dried, I began the process of priming them. I mentioned quite a bit about primer in my recent post about the Thomasville 3 Drawer Chest. You can read about that here.

I used General Finishes Stain Blocker and applied two coats, waiting 24 hours in between each layer.

Once the two coats were applied, I was still experiencing staining on the bottom drawer of the taller nightstand. I applied a third layer of Stain Blocker and waited another 24 hours. Stains were still coming through, which indicated that I needed to tweak my light colored makeover for the pieces.

Stain Blocker is an excellent primer. It has a sophisticated resin system and does a fabulous job of blocking most stains, but some are stubborn and will come through no matter which primer you apply. My staining was not a result of a failure of the product because every other part of the nightstands sealed excellently. It was just this one drawer so there must have been something on it that was strong enough to wiggle its way through.

As a compromise, I decided to decoupage the fronts of the drawers with pages from a 1920 world atlas that I picked up from a local antique shop. Whenever you're venturing into the world of furniture painting, you need to stay flexible. Some pieces don't behave as well as others and you have to adjust.

I chose General Finishes "Linen" as the color for the body of the nightstands because the warm cream paired so nicely with the pages of the atlas.

Now General Finishes Linen is much more yellow than Miss Mustard Seed's Linen. I painted the depression era radio cabinet in MMS Milk Paint's Linen, so you can see that it's much whiter and has less yellow.

Compare that to General Finishes Linen.

Here's how GF's Linen compares to the other neutrals in the line.

These nightstands took quite a bit of work to paint because the drawers are not inset. They wrap around the body of the nightstands, so I needed to remove all 6 of them and spread everything out on the floor of the workshop. It was quite the scene!

To continue with the warm tones on the pieces, I added 6 new gilded bronze knobs from D. Lawless.

As you can see, the left nightstand is shorter than the right, but they have 3 drawers each and some trim around the top. Even the bottoms are close in shape!

I think they look so cute as a "his" and "hers" set, don't you?

These nightstands were a multi-step makeover and required a lot of supplies - new hardware, decoupage medium, decoupage paper, primer, multiple coats of paint and a topcoat. As a result, they're priced at $295 because of the amount of work it took to get them to the point they're at. It's funny...before I started painting furniture, I never understood why some pieces were so expensive. Now that I do it professionally, I completely understand why! Some pieces take a lot more effort and materials to look amazing than others. These pretty pieces fall directly into that category.

If you're interested, the measurements are below:

Shorter Nightstand:

14.5 inches wide

14.5 inches deep

26 inches tall

Taller Nightstand:

14.5 inches wide

19.25 inches deep

30 inches tall

I haven't decided where they'll be sold quite yet because my retail spaces are full at the moment. You can always send me an email if you're interested!