DIY MID-CENTURY MODERN NIGHTSTAND
Today we are making these suuuper cool mid century modern night stands for Kelsey’s new room in the loft!
Cost: $50-$100
Difficulty: ✂ ✂
Materials:
- 2 10 x 14 pieces of wood
- 2 10 x 7.5 pieces of wood
- 1 14 x 9 piece of wood
- 4 t-nuts
- Wood glue
- 7 ½ inch furniture legs
- Wood stain
- Varathane clear coat
Tools:
- Hammer
- Rubber gloves
- Drill
To make this night stand side table you’ll need 2 10 x 14 pieces of wood that are ¾” thick. The hardware store can usually cut this for you 2 10 x 7.5 pieces that are also ¾” thick and 1 14 x 9 piece that can be as thin or as thick as you want. Ours was ⅛” thick. You’ll also need 4 of these t-nuts. These create threaded holes in your wood that will help us screw the table legs into the bottom. Start with one of your 10 x 14” pieces and measure in how far you want the legs to be. We did 1 and a half inches in from each side. Mark out 4 dots for this. Next using a drill bit that is the size of your t-nut drill 4 holes. This part is a little tricky because you need to make the holes deep enough for the nuts to go in, but not so deep that you come out the other side. Go slowly with this if you’re not sure. Once all your holes are made, we’re dropping in a little bit of wood glue to help the nuts stay in place. Now with a hammer, hammer the nuts into the holes until they are flush with the wood.
Now we’re ready to put our side pieces on.
Here’s where we thought we had a genius idea that didn’t end up working out so well. We bought these wooden plugs that we thought we could use to cover up the screws we’ll be using to assemble the table. This way the table would look like solid wood and we wouldn’t see any ugly screws, smart right? We needed to place the plugs so close to the edge of the wood so it would line up with our side pieces and we needed to use a large drill bit for this. All this together ended up chipping the wood and it was not cute. Good thing this was the bottom piece. So we scrapped this idea and just went straight for the screws. A pro tip here is to drill a small pilot hole for the screw so that it doesn’t split the wood when going in. Once all 4 corners were screwed in, it was feeling super sturdy. Now for the top piece. We still wanted to avoid seeing the screws so we opted for nails this time since the top didn’t need to hold as much weight. Hammer a nail into each of the 4 corners. Once the stain was on later, they were barely noticeable.
For the legs, we’re using simple 7 ½ inch furniture legs we picked up from the hardware store. Screw one into each t-nut. Now time for the back piece. We had to place our screws lightly out from each corner to avoid hitting the screws and nails that we’re in the wood from the top and the bottom. We started out using the regular long nails we used for the top piece but we realized we didn’t actually need such big nails since our back piece was pretty thin. We switched over to finishing nails for the bottom corners. Once it’s all put together, we gave it a good sanding using an electric sander to make sure all the edges were smooth and everything felt flush together. Pro tip, don’t wear your nice clothes for this, saw dust gets everywhere!
Lastly we’re staining the wood a nice brown, but you could of course leave the natural wood colour as well. Use a staining pad or some scrap fabric to rub on the stain. Make sure you’re wearing rubber gloves and doing this in a well ventilated area. The key to staining is to treat it more like an oil you’re trying to rub into the wood as opposed to a paint that sits on top.
Keep massaging the stain into to wood until it doesn’t look wet or drippy. For the legs we found it easiest to take one leg off at a time to stain under it. Then we stained the actual leg and screwed it back into place. Let the stain dry for a couple of hours and then we followed up with a Varathane clear coat to give the table some shine. This goes on the same way you applied the stain. Let the table dry for a full 24 hours and it’s ready to use!
We love it when we can see the AMAZING work you guys do, so please show us your work with the hashtag #SorryGirlsSquad, and please check out the video below for more info!