I have a love-hate relationship with DIY furniture. It can be so great to achieve the look you’re going for at a more affordable price. However, I often experience a few DIY roadblocks, if you will. First is that the choices and possibilities are endless, making it hard to pick a direction and stick with it. Second, I tend to get hung up on the details and can become frustrated if something isn’t turning out the way I imagined. But, doing house projects is actually good practice for me to learn how to live with my decisions and not sweat the small stuff. 

A perfect example of this are the nightstands we made for our primary bedroom refresh. I knew I wanted something circular to have a little shape variation in the room. Also, I wanted something with a lighter wood tone. And, I wanted to get rid of the storage in the nightstands. Wait a second…get RID of storage? I know, I know. It sounds naïve and pointless. But from experience, we tend to just collect junk in our nightstands. Or create little secondary stashes for things like nail clippers and medicines that have a primary home. So we’d end up looking for these items where they should be and forgetting they were in the nightstands. Especially having a smaller house that’s one story, I thought it was doable to give everything it’s one place and eliminate the little nail clipper graveyards.

Knowing my parameters, I started browsing for nightstands online. I found a few things I liked, but nothing really special, and certainly nothing under $100 each. This really wasn’t in the budget for this part of the project. So we decided to turn to Facebook marketplace to find something we could easily paint or refinish and live with until it was more feasible to buy something we really loved. But I wasn’t finding much there, either. A challenge we had is that our new bed frame made our bed sit quite high, so it was hard to find traditional nightstands at the right height. With all our seemingly difficult list of needs, our searches turned up empty. So, I began thinking outside the box. How could I find something cheap and still get the height and round shape I was set on? I finally came across some wooden stools, which had both the round shape and a good height. Check and check! They were only $30 for the pair, so I snagged them and got to work. 

Process and Supplies

Wood round 

Sandpaper

Polyurethane

Sander

Drill

Screws

Wood glue 

Foam brush 

The picture below is where we started. I liked the black legs, so our first thought was to just sand the top down and re-stain it so I could get the light wood tone. We used 150 grit sandpaper and the finish did start coming off, as you can see in the picture below. However, the wood didn’t look that nice. It was definitely a cheap composite wood, not a nice solid wood. As we decided to ditch that plan, we also started thinking about the size of the top. Looking at it with something set on the top (the sander) it seemed really small. Now I know I said I’m trying to simplify but I do need an ample surface for things like a lamp and my phone. 

So, we decided to buy pre-made wood rounds to attach to the top of the stools. We used an 18-inch size to be sure we had plenty of surface area to work with. 

The rounds were already pretty smooth, so I just went over them with 220 grit on the orbital sander to smooth them out.

Because our room is so bright and white, I really wanted to leave the rounds with their natural color instead of staining them something darker that would be out of place in the room. After sanding them down, I did three coats of a matte polyurethane, sanding with 400 grit in between coats. My preference is always to apply poly with a foam brush. 

Now it was time to attach the wood rounds to the stools. We first considered removing the existing top from the legs so we could replace it with the new rounds. But we decided there wasn’t a great way to do that without damage, so we thought, why not just attach the new rounds right over the old? This way would prevent damage, make it easy to screw the new rounds on, and also add a little more height, which was great for our tall bed frame. Bonus! I first painted the stool tops with a black paint to match the legs, so they would blend better. 

Then we just used some wood glue and screws to attach the rounds on top. We were worried about how it would look attached on top, but I think it ended up great! You never really see them from this angle, anyway. 

And there you have it!  Nightstands that work perfectly for the space and for only about $30 each. 

DIY furniture is generally what we turn to when we need something that works until we have the money to invest in the “real” thing. But these ended up working so well, I don’t have any desire to replace them! Funny how the perfect answer can sneak up on you when you’re not even trying to find it.