Nightstands with Copper Pipe Drawer Pulls

This post is sponsored by BEHR, but all opinions are 100% my own. I only recommend products that I love and use myself. You can read more about my disclosures here.

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years when it comes to painting furniture, it’s that I prefer to use existing paint colors rather than a random mix of whatever I have.

Don’t get me wrong, mixing up random cans of paint here and there is a great way to create custom colors or to use up paint that may otherwise sit and grow old all by its lonesome.

However, I never seem to have any leftover for touchups or to use on additional projects I may want to match.

Sure you can have custom paint colors mixed to match an existing paint color, but if I have to haul in a piece of furniture for them to color match because I have no sample paint for them to test… it’s just not gonna happen.

So I made myself a promise that I would keep custom mixed paint for smaller home decor projects or wall paintings.

I guess the moral of the story is if you do plan to mix up random paints for projects, just make sure you save a little extra or that you write down the exact amounts of each color used 🙂

Navy & White Nightstands with Copper Pipe Drawer Pulls

Today I’m finally sharing our navy and white nightstands with copper pipe drawer pulls. Ya know, the ones I’ve been promising on Instagram for months? Seriously, where does the time go?

To say I LOVE these nightstands would be an understatement, but that wasn’t always the case.

These bad boys were an awesome find on Craigslist, and they definitely needed some work but I was up for the challenge. Besides, they were the perfect height for our bed and how could I resist 2 matching wood nightstands for $25?!.

After a good cleaning, sanding them down and then filling in the deep scratches with wood putty I was ready to paint.

The plan was to have them match our navy dresser with copper pipe drawer pulls, but unfortunately, I had painted that piece with a custom navy mixture and I didn’t have any left. Booooooo.

So instead I opted for navy spray paint. To be honest, I thought these would just be a decent set of functional nightstands to last until we found something we liked more, and that a quick spray paint job would suffice. Only the paint job turned out pretty cruddy. Mainly because I had picked up semi-gloss spray paint and they looked all shiny. Too shiny.

All of a sudden you could see all of the imperfections, which hadn’t seemed so bad once I had sanded the nightstands down. Bleh.

After another quick sanding, I re-painted the base of the nightstands with a new mix of navy paint from random paints I had leftover. {This was the last time I painted furniture with randomly mixed paint}.

They turned out okay, but they were still pretty glossy because that was the sheen from some of the paints I mixed in. You may recall seeing them in my post about our Rustic-Modern Lamp.

Third time’s a charm

However, I was tired of sanding and painting so I decided just to let them be. Or so I thought… 

Several months later the color really started to bug me so I gave in and hoped that the 3rd time would be a charm, and luckily it was. Whew!

At this point I realized these nightstands weren’t going anywhere soon so,  so I decided to use Behr paint so that I would know the exact color used in case I needed to touch up paint, or wanted to paint anything else to match in the future.

After testing out a couple of sample paints I decided to go with Starless Night and Behr Ultra Pure White, both in the satin finish. 

We re-sanded the nightstands {again} to get them nice and smooth, and then used our paint sprayer to paint the base Starless Night and the drawers in Ultra Pure white, which I shared on Instagram.

I like that Starless Night is more of a midnight blue which matches our dresser really well and the satin finish looked sooooooo much better than the gloss!

I used 2 coats of paint and once dry I waxed them both for added protection and then added the copper pipe drawer pulls just like I did to our dresser.

And now, this is what they look like:

So what do you think of the color combination and the DIY drawer pulls?

Paint Colors used:

BEHR Premium Plus Ultra in Satin: Starless Night PPU14-20 – For the base of the nightstand

BEHR Premium Plus Ultra in Satin: Ultra Pure White – For the drawers of the nightstand

You can view all of our previous BEHR projects here.