The Pink Lady

I think I'm in love!  I bought this antique nightstand a few weeks ago off Craigslist, and it was one of the many projects I've been working on this past week!

Here is the before:

Gross hardware:

One of the drawers was messed up, so I had to pry off the front so I could fix it.

I put gorilla glue on all the areas that would go together.  Once the front was reattached to drawer I held it together with  a clamp and nailed the side back on.

While I was working on it some creepy bug came running across the garage floor at me.

Note to creepy bugs - never come running at a chic holding a hammer.  I smush now, ask questions later.

While I was cleaning out the inside I discovered this:

Apparently my "nightstand" used to be an old phonograph player that was converted into a nightstand.  That made me love it even more!

Because it was so friggin cold, and I didn't have time to wait on the weather to clear up, I moved inside to paint after the hubby left for work.

I got caught! Oh well.

Here she is with one coat:

I wanted to do a harlequin pattern on top.  I knew I couldn't free hand it, and I didn't have a stencil, so I did the next best thing.  I cut out my own stencils with cardstock and my exacto knife.  I love that stuff!

Once all the stencils were in place I rolled over the top with a coat of paint.  I knew it would be a slightly different color - just enough so I could see the pattern to paint.

It worked brilliantly - except for one small glitch:

Yeah - girl genius here taped the stencils on.  So naturally, the tape ripped off the paint. Awesome.

So I just painted over the holes.

I originally wanted to paint the other squares, but since these looked horrible now I had no choice but to paint them.  I grabbed my purdy and got started filling in the squares.

Perfect? No way.  Did I care? Not at all.  I wanted this to look old and imperfect, so the uneven pattern worked for me.

After it dried overnight I went to town sanding everything down.  I went over the edges very heavily, and I tried to really sand down the purple squares.

I forgot to mention, the purple squares were supposed to be dark pink.  I added a little bit of black to my pink paint and somehow it ended up purple.  Whatever. I went with it.

Here she is with a coat of Minwax Dark Walnut stain.  I used cheesecloth this time.  This worked better for me than the t-shirt material.

Once it dried I put on satin wipe-on poly.

Here she is in her new home!

Here is a photo where you can kind of see the old nightstands we had.  They were cute, but really chunky and not tall enough.  The new nightstand is at the perfect height.

I bought an antique washstand for the hubby's new nightstand.  I'll do a post on that later!

So here are all the angles of my new love!

Yeah, my handle is crooked.  I don't care.

I love those sweet legs!!

One more before and after:

Cheers!

Linking to these parties!
MommaHen