Night Stands: IKEA RAST HACK

I recently purchased two IKEA RAST dressers and decided I wanted to turn them into night stands. After looking at a bunch of hacks on Pinterest I finally combined a few of my favorites to create my own hack. You can see the inspiration I used here and the final product here. 

So, for starters I kind of did this 2 different ways. The first dresser I was so impatient that when I got it I put it together right away. Then I thought to myself “why would you do that?” It’s so much easier to stain them before they’re put together. So, for the second dresser I stained all the pieces individually before putting it together. 

I started by using Minwax Jacobean, but then, after putting the dresser together, decided it was too brown and wanted the color to be a little more gray.

So I went back and stained the dresser with a coat of Minwax Classic Gray. 

To be honest, I got kind of lazy toward the end there and didn't fully stain the insides of the dresser. you cant see the inside anyway, so I made sure to stain the outer edge where you could see but didn't worry too much about the rest. 

Once I was done staining, I waited overnight for the stain to fully settle and then used MINWAX Polyacrylic Protective Finish in Satin and a Woodster foam brush to seal the dresser. 

There were a few things that I still needed to fix before the night stands were complete. The dressers looked so "Blah" just as they were, so I wanted to make them look a little more refined. First, the top of the dressers had a dip in them. 

I fixed this by cutting a new top 25in wide and in deep.

For the drawers I added a trim around them to make them look more finished. I bought 4 1in x10ft 1/2 in thick pine board and used a miter saw to cut the angles for the corners. 

I used the same wood for the sides of the dresser too.

After the whole thing was pretty much done, something still wasn't sitting right with me- the color. It needed a little contrast. I decided to paint the outside Sherwin Williams White Cotton. The dresser was too plain stained all the same color. For me, the white base really livened it up!