Nightstand Before and After

My poor alarm clock has been living on the floor for about 7 months now. I donated my makeshift nightstand to the guest bathroom in October when Jason and Jolene came to visit and it has remained there ever since.


Once we found a nightstand to go with my dresser my alarm clock was elated!


I used a similar process to refinishing my dresser except I had a fancy new tool to get to all the small spaces - The Dremel Multimax!


This little guy has turned out to be an excellent purchase and has the potential to be even more helpful. I'll do a review on it and how it's the perfect woman's tool later this week.

Back to the nightstand. I used the orbital sander with 100 grit sand paper to sand all the large flat surface down to bare wood.

Some tips to think about when using an orbital sander:

1. Make sure to wait to turn your sander on until AFTER you have placed it on the the piece of furniture. If you life it off, turn it off and repeat the above step. If you start sanding when it's already turned on it'll catch and damage the wood.
   
2. Hook it up to your shopvac to reduce dust - there is a nifty attachment that you can find at your local hardware store to go straight from hose to sander.
   
3. When sanding paint or varnish keep your eye on the sand paper. Both paint and particularly varnish can get built up on the paper and cause irregular sanding. You can scrape it out with a wire brush (or just use your fingernails like I do) and continue to use the same sandpaper.

After I had the major sanding done I broke out the new multimax and got into the corners and crevices. I also had to do some hand sanding to rough up the smaller details. I did not sand the trim pieces down to bare wood but instead roughed them up some with sandpaper and then stained over the existing stain. Again I used the stain + poly mix by Minwax so it would match the dresser, however I'm not totally in love with this product. It can be difficult to get an even coat, but maybe that's operater error and not the fault of the stain. :) I stuck with the existing hardware because it kind of matches and the leftover matching one from my dresser was too big. Sad.

Before

After