Grown Up Night Stands

Niels and I have often joked about the irony that our three-year-old has nicer bedroom furniture than we do. When we were expecting D, we bought a convertible crib with matching armoire and dresser. (We kicked ourselves later for not getting the nightstand, but we came up with a good solution).

For our room, we have plans to eventually have our cabinet maker build us a frame with head board and foot board. In the mean time, we make do. Before staging our house for sale, we used the filing cabinets from Niels' old desk for our night stand. They worked well, but were quite ugly. We bought a couple of small night stands from Target to make the room look pretty. Pretty does not equal functional! For all the months our house was for sale and the last few months we've been moved in, I have probably mentioned, or at least wished for, bigger nightstands, as most every night I knock either my phone, my glasses, my reading glasses, my water, or my lamp on the floor.

See how dinky that thing is?

This past weekend we were at Ikea. We had planned to get shelving for Niels' office, but our car wasn't big enough for the boxes. As we were wandering around, we started looking for a night stand for our guest room, where our exchange student will be staying for the next school year (more about that in another post!). The Ikea night stands were also quite small. Then I remembered seeing an article in Real Simple about using book cases or drawers for night stands. The large pieces balance well with a king size bed. So we picked up a couple Hopen chests:

We got home too late Sunday to put them together, but Monday I could wait to get started. While Niels put D down, I set out all the pieces.

And arranged all the screws and little bits.

Being European, Niels has the "Ikea-assembly" gene, but he still looked at the directions, for my sake.

It went pretty quickly once we started assembling the drawers.

The first chest, on Niels' side, took almost two hours to put together (including about ten minutes when I was on snuggle duty with the little boy).

We put mine together much faster, in less than an hour.

What a difference!

I have no idea what we'll be using all that space for since we still have empty drawers in our bathroom. I'm sure we'll think of something over the next thirty or so years!

I took some more photos in the morning.

Now that we've fixed the nightstand issue, I guess it's time we get to work on the art above the bed. Another project for another day.

Print this post