Jake nightstand

My son's room needs some TLC, but I am not ready to do a complete redo just yet.  Eventually, I want to make him a Pottery Barn style store bed and completely redo the walls and decor, but he really likes the clone trooper walls so that can wait.

He does need a nightstand and bookcase right away, so I have been playing with some ideas I have seen in magazines and on the web.  He is 7, so I want something that he will like now and also when he is in middle school.  After looking at a lot of ideas, he really liked an industrial look.

Renovation Hardware is one of places we have looked at for ideas with their pipe furnture.  This led us to research a ton of different takes on using flanges and galvanized pipe.  Jake liked the idea of using it in furniture, so we decided to build a double shelf nightstand.

I started with a butcher block from Ikea.  It ended up working well, but be warned that there were some voids in the board that shot off when we were cutting it with a circular saw.  We cut the board into 3 equal pieces.

This is one of my favorite set ups for painting.  Can you guess where these tools came from?  The dropcloth is actually a baby mattress protector.  It is perfect because one side is soft plastic so paint won't seep through, and the other side is slightly padded, so you don't scratch your work surface.  Which is good because the background you will see is my granite counter top's backsplash.

The supports are Pringles single serving cups.  I love the pyramid things you can buy (or you lovely sister Kathy can give you as a gift), but sometimes if you press too hard, you can cause an small indentation on the underside.  Plus, this gives you an excuse to eat more Pringles.

I used Annie Sloan chalk paint in a custom color I mixed myself.  I wanted an industrial looking grey, but I wanted it to be warm.  Some people say that they don't get brush strokes with chalk paint, but I am not one of them.  I lightly sanded between coats and wiped with a microfiber cloth.

Jake's named is from a stencil cut on my Silhouette Cameo.  The Cameo rocks since  you can create and cut almost anything you can produce on your computer.  I rarely use it for home projects, but it came in handy for the nightstand project twice.

With the grey color, I thought that galvanized pipes in the regular silver color wouldn't look good against the warm grey of the wood.  I didn't want to paint or distress them because I am lazy.  Amazon to the rescue!  I found these blackish version of the flanges and pipes I wanted,  and the price was great, too.  I spray painted my screw heads black so they wouldn't show.

I measured where the flanges should be and used my Silhouette Cameo to make a template from heavy kraft paper.

I screwed flanged to two of my boards. 

The pipes need to be screwed into the secured flanges, and then the upper flanges must be screwed onto the pipes.  This is the tricky part because they have to be the same height.  I might have used some bad words here.

Next, I took my template and cut a slit to open the circle.  I could then place my upside down pipe/flange/board onto the underside of the board above and put the template around the flange.  This helped to make placement exactly the same as the lower flange.

After I had the 3 boards together, I attached casters to the bottom.  They worked well for a couple of reasons.  First, pipes come in standard heights, and the piece would not be regular nightstand height without feet, and I didn't want to be overloaded with pipes.  Second, they make it easy to move the nightstand around if I ever wanted to clean when cleaning behind his bed while staying with the industrial look.

Here is a peek at his bookcase which I will post about soon.