Guest bedroom bedside table – updates

Have you ever decorated part of your home and once it was finished, it didn’t exactly look better? Yeah, that happens around here more often than I’d like to admit. 
Case in point, our spare bedroom earlier this year [below]. I painted our bedside table black and accessorized it with pieces I wasn’t particularly fond of and it was all just BLEUH. Everything needed a bit of an upgrade, so on Monday night I repainted the bedside table with leftover Dulux Exterior SatinWood ‘iron clad’ paint that I used on our living room stools. This paint is meant for front doors, but it works like an absolute dream on furniture. 

Upgrade step 1: complete! Now onto step 2: in keeping with my current a bit less IKEA phase [ie – our new old desk], the next step was to find a replacement lamp for the IKEA lamp we had. Yesterday I took to my well-worn Dublin charity shop route and I spotted this absolutely lush gold lamp in Second Abbey …

Phwoar. Isn’t it well lush? I headed to Dunnes Stores and picked up a small black pleated lamp shade to bring it out of the early 90’s, and I’ve got to say, I’m ridiculously pleased with how it turned out. Just LOOK at it …

All shiny and gold and pretty. I next upgraded our rescue kit for unexpected guests box [psst – you can also see what the bedside table originally looked like in that post]. I had a spare white KASSET box from my DIY holiday memory boxes, so I added the contents of the rescue kit to the slightly fancier box and added an old school Dymo Omega label to balance out all the fancy. And damn straight, I am mixing gold and silver. 
And last but not least, I decided to jazz up the bedside table by doing something I almost never do – I bought flowers. I love flowers in our home so I don’t really know why I’m always hesitant to buy them. I will admit part of me thinks it’s a bit of a waste of money. I know that sounds harsh. I tried to curb my opinion by buying these pretty pink roses which were reduced yet absolutely perfect [WINNING]. I trimmed them into one of our gold tumblers, et voila. 

When I showed husband the new getup in the spare bedroom, the first thing he said was “are you sure you want to keep that lamp there? It’s really nice and we’ll never see it in the spare bedroom … “. He makes a good point. Yes, he may be critiquing my styling placement, but I’ll focus more so on the fact that he thinks I made a kick-ass Frankenstein lamp 🙂 xx A

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3 Comments

  1. October 17, 2014 / 16:58

    That new black shade on the gold base looks great – it really transforms the look of the lamp! Gorgeous!
    I confess I liked what you did with the bedside table the first time round, but I like this too! Those delicate roses are such a lovely contrast to the bold and black – very pretty!
    Loving your upgraded rescue kit too! Must create one of those for my spare-room once we finish getting things in order there!
    Maria xx

    • October 18, 2014 / 07:24

      I completely forgot to mention in this blog post that I repainted the bedside table because the black spray paint I used on it initially, was wildly unsuitable 🙁 Anything I put on it stuck and chipped little pieces of paint off of it. Even dust was sticking to it. Because I'm an idiot. I too really liked the black paint, but it unfortunately wasn't suitable. Massive sad face.

      Glad you like the lamp and flowers! I unfortunately forgot to add some wabi-sabi to the mix. Ugh! 😉

    • October 18, 2014 / 21:25

      Ha, yeah I did re-notice the wabi-sabi in the old pic! But I think you got away without any in version 2!! 😉
      Annoying about the black spray-paint – ah well, you have now rectified the situation with style and aplomb!
      Maria xx