New night stands with painting disaster

So... the night stands, or the lack of them that I mentioned here are now ready and on their right places. This Ikea hack I made with the new night stands didn't seem to first work out at all. I bought two Expedit Cubes that can be attached to the wall (I can't find the cube from Ikea's webpage? Whaat!?) and the drawers to go inside the cube. My point on getting new bedside tables was that I wanted something that could be attached to the wall so vacuuming would be easier and also I wanted the new night stands to be slightly smaller ones than the old ones. Also I wanted them to be shiny white, the old ones we had were brown.

I forgot to take any proper before photos. But here you can somewhat see what we had before in the bed room. The picture is taken on spring when I was doing the spring clean.

Also I took a photo of the cabinet which I used when I placed the cabinets on sale in the web.

Dull thing was that the cubes I bought did not come in shiny white like I wanted but instead in the mat yellowish white. Also on the cubes the top and the bottom was supposed to be attached with screws through the boards. That would have meant that the screw head would be visible. Which meant that I needed to do some hacking.

I don't know what went through my my head when I started to assemble the cubes. Because for some odd reason I desided to attach the parts with plugs instead of making a deeper hole for the countersunk screw which I could have then spackled over. That would have been so much easier.

Anyway I was a jackass, because of course I was unable to put the plugs exactly on the same line so the sides of the cubes are now just a tiny bit closer to each other than they should and now the top drawer in the cube does not slide as well as it should. I would have never thought that the tolerances in Ikea furniture is this tight.

Once I got the cubes assembled I desided to spray paint them to shiny white. I started with a primer. I had bought one primer and two shiny top paint cans. The painting was a total disaster! It was just horrible! The primer spread out everywhere, luckily it didn't stick to anything I didn't want it to stick but the dust spread all over. And the smell, awfull!

Then I started with the top paint, it would have been okey, but from somewhere I got dust on the painted surface and the result was just bad. There were tiny pieces of dust on the surface and it looked horrible. Also I run out of paint, two cans was just too little. I had killed half of my brain cells in the smell and the result was horrendous. I was so annoyed that I didn't even take a picture of the horrible finish.

Then after listening to some advise from my colleaque I returned to using regular paint. I sanded the spray painting I had done and painted with furniture primer. I sanded again and then painted with shiny oil based paint with a mohair roller.

And the finish was so nice! I love the result I got when using the regular paint, I didn't have any dust problems either. Just look how shiny it is.

Then was just left to hang the cubes on the wall and assemble the drawers. I would have wanted to hung the cube just a bit lower but under the other cube is a socket which defines the hight.

Because I did not paint the underside so here you can see what the screw would have looked like if it was on the top.

After all the trouble I still do think the painting was worth it, I do love these cubes. I love the airy feeling they have because they seem to float next to the bed. If I would have been happy with the shade of white the cubes were I think I could have just covered the top to hide the screws. Like a glass plate that has a painted underside or a painted board.