Mull Makeover: Ikea RAST Nightstand Hack

Have y'all seen all the Ikea "hacks" going on in blogland and on Pinterest? They're all over the place. About a year and a half ago we jumped on the hacking train, and thus, this is the tale of how we hacked a pair of RAST nightstands and just got around to blogging about it.

It all started with this major dilemma. Remember when I painted this sewing table turned nightstand here? Well, it was a good size and all, but it didn't have ANY storage. That little drawer looking thing there doesn't even pull out, it just hinges to about halfway open. So for real, no storage. And I need storage, as you can see from this picture of my side of the bed. After a few months of living like this (and most times, worse), I decided there had to be a better solution. Not to mention that during all this time, Stuart was using a small chair as his nightstand.

Enter our solution--the Ikea RAST chest. A three drawer, solid wood chest for the bargain price of $34.99. Picked up two of 'em. Only problem iss, they aren't too cute if you don't do anything to them = hack time. First, I researched on the Internet and looked at other RAST hacks to see what I liked best. There are literally tons of people that have put their own spin on these little chests. Like most Ikea furniture, the RAST comes unassembled so once we knew the direction we wanted to take ours in, we assembled our chests.

Ta-dah! See what I mean? They aren't much to look at at first. So we got to work. After seeing other projects, we knew we wanted to add some trim to the fronts and sides of our RASTs to give them more of a shaker look. Also, you can see in the Ikea picture of the RAST chest that the sides stick out a little past the drawer fronts. That bothered me and the lattice trim makes the drawers flush with the sides--even more reason to add it! We found lattice in the molding department at Lowe's and used that to trim out the fronts and sides.

We cut the short pieces on the front to be 7 3/8"-ish (we are definitely not carpenters, so we just try to get our measurements as close as we can). The longer pieces ended up measuring 20 1/4"-ish and fit inside the short pieces on either end.

There's my main squeeze cutting all the pieces. 4 pieces per drawer x 3 (drawers) x 2 (chests) + 4 pieces per side x 2 (sides) x 2 (chests) equals kind of a lot of cuts. He may kill me for posting this picture of him. It was the dead of summer, hence his lack of a shirt. And those are my pink crocs, not his. But he was wearing them. Too funny not to take a picture of...and post.

We didn't use any fancy power tools to make cuts--just this miter box that my dad got us from Lowe's for $15.98. We have used this little box on so many different projects--I'd say it's a must-have in a DIYer's toolbox.

Above you can see one of the chest's drawers all trimmed out. To attach the lattice, we used a strip of wood glue under each piece and then used our super fancy clamping system, aka: soup cans, to apply pressure. Wood glue dries super fast, so this process didn't take long.

Once we finished with the drawers, we added a piece of baseboard molding across the bottom fronts of each chest. If you look back to the picture with the soup cans and/or the actual Ikea picture near the top, you'll notice that the bottoms of the chests were indented. Me no likey. So this piece of molding hides that. We nailed it down, sunk the nail holes, and filled them with wood putty.

But oh no! Look what happened--the baseboard molding was a little too tall and made our chests off-kilter. So we justed added a piece of molding under each chest and that steadied them (see below).

We also sunk all the screws we had to use assembling the pieces and puttied over them, then sanded.

Lastly, we made tops for our RASTs. In the picture above, you can see that the sides come up a little over the top of the piece. Again, me no likey. So we got some stain-grade wood and cut it to fit exactly on top. We also got some stain-grade trim (similar to our lattice) to add to the side of our new top. We used wood glue and a few nails to hold the top together. I'm sorry I don't have more pictures from the side so you can see how it fits on there, put it basically looks like an upside down tray that fits snug on top.

View from above, pre-stain. After we got everything built, it was time to stain and paint.

We used a red mahogany stain on the tops, which is the same stain color on our hardwood floors. We did three coats of stain, followed by polyurethane to seal, protect, and make our tops shiny. Then we painted the rest of the piece Valspar's Dove White. We ordered these drawer pulls from Lee Valley Tools--they are the 43mm x 51mm OB ring pulls and were selling for $2.05 each when we snagged them.

Look at my side now! (you can tell this is an old picture now that you've seen how the butterfly prints are looking these days!). I can honestly say that my side is now tidy {pretty much} all the time, thanks to all the storage those three drawers provide.

And here they are all matchy-matchy, his and hers bedside tables. We have had them finished for a good long while and are still just as pleased with them now as the day we declared them complete!

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