architheque

Painted this two weekends ago and left it fumigating the dining room while I was gone for the holidays. I’ve placed it as my nightstand, but I think it’ll be for sale soon.

I got this nightstand along with a wood dresser off Craiglist, $15 for both pieces, sometime back in the summer. The dresser has been a bit of a nightmare, but more on that later. The nightstand is sturdy, solid wood all around, except for the top couple of milimeters of the surface, which is formica. Ideally that’s good - no water stains from a sweating glass - but I didn’t want white.

I scratched up all the surfaces with a sander then applied a primer. Behr, I think. This is the first time I’ve ever used tinted primer. I still had to put four coats of the final blue on, so I can’t tell that the tint made any difference. I used a foam brush for all of the steps. Honestly, I need to work on my technique - I found it hard not to leave brush marks. In my ideal world, I’d have a paint booth and I’d spray everything.

Everything got painted, even the drawer knob. The idea was to make it look pop-artish, or at least artificial-on-purpose (I would have loved to dip it in silicone). I had eight blue paint chips taped to the table for at least two months. I thought I wanted a darker blue, then I thought I wanted a Yves Klein blue, then I thought I wanted a peacock teal. I kept coming back to this color. Naturally, now that I’ve done it, I wish I’d gone darker again.

Finished the piece with a drawer liner made from wrapping paper. Love it.