A new bedside table and a promise

Soooo, clearly I haven't gotten into the swing of posting regularly yet.  I apologize for the ludicrously long gap between my last post (January, seriously?!) and today's and I cross my heart and whatnot that I'll try to do better from now on.  Promise!

I do have good news, though!  Even though I haven't been posting, I have been taking lots of pictures to document all the stuff I've been working on.  So without further ado, here's installment number 1 of many catch-you-up posts!

Over the last few months I've been working on slowly redecorating my daughter's bedroom.  She's transitioned from her toddler bed into a (drumroll please...) twin size bed!  Way to go my sweet, sweet girl.  As a result of that move, I've felt the need to update her bedroom to more of a big kid feel.  Additionally, our son will eventually be sharing that room with her so I'm trying to make it a good room for both of them.  I've had an ocean theme in there since we moved in, but I've decided to go with more of a bright and colorful forest theme.

I'll be doing several posts on the progress I've made, but today I thought I'd share the super cute bedside table makeover I did.  Ever since I refinished our coffee table I've been looking for another piece to paint, and I found the perfect thing in this little chest of drawers from the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.

She needs some work, huh?  I'd already started sanding a little before I took these pictures, but they give you a pretty good idea of how she looked before I started working.  The whole thing was spray painted (very poorly, I might add) in a glossy black.  I'm a pretty bad spray painter myself, so I sympathized with all the crackly, drippy spots the previous owner had made.  As you can see, whoever owned this table before me decided to dress 'er up with a nice thick covering of garish butterfly and flower decals.  The one's I had already removed are in a pile on the top in the above photo.  They left pretty nasty sticky spots that I had to work hard to sand down.

Don't you love those big fat wooden knobs?  Those things drive me crazy, so I knew from the beginning that they were goners.  I let Lily choose their replacements and I think she did a great job choosing!

With all the bright colors I planned to use in their room, I wanted to go with something neutral for this table.  I've been loving all the grays and chippy old wood I've seen on Pinterest lately, so I decided to try gray with some dry-brushed white on top to give the piece some age.  I didn't get any in-process pictures (oops), so here's the final product!

Tada!  Isn't it cute?  Lily chose the prettiest blue milk glass knobs, and I think they look really beautiful with the grey.  I'm sorry these pictures don't capture much of the dry-brushing detail.  It turned out really well!  To protect the finish I did three coats of wax on the exterior and one coat inside the drawers.

Since Lily chose the blue knobs I decided to add a little surprise to compliment them.  I have lots of the lovely blue paint from our coffee table leftover, so I used that to give a bright pop of color to the inside of the drawers.

That lamp is one I've had for a while, but for this redo I added those rosettes to the shade to give it a little more punch.  Like the owl?  I made this one myself, but it was inspired by this one from Kerry's sweet Etsy shop.  Here's the table with the bed:

Doesn't that look nice?  I love it how it all turned out!  And look at that cute little curly-headed photo bomber. :)  I'm so proud of that quilt, too.  It turned out even better than I'd imagined!  If you're interested in having one, I do sell them here in my Etsy shop.  They're really bright and fun, and Lily loves to snuggle up in hers every night.

Whew!  That turned out to be a very long post!  Thanks for persevering all the way to the end!  Do you like how the big kid room is coming together?  Let me know!

I'm linking up here: