If you remember from my post about inspiration boards, we want to have dark furniture in the bedroom.

Bedroom by JeniRae on Polyvore.com

We have that dresser, are planning to get that headboard and we had some nightstands that were scavenged from Byron's parents' attic at some point. They looked like this:

Not particularly interesting, but they are solid with clean lines and fit nicely in the space available in our bedroom.

Also an option were the nightstands that match the headboard we plan to get. They are from the Avington Collection at www.target.com.



However, being a cheapskate, I refuse to spend $149 a piece on those suckers!

That's where Minwax Polyshades comes in.

For about $12 (I think), I was able to get a quart of this stuff in "Bombay Mahogany". I used about 1/3 of the quart for two coats on two nightstands. The nice thing about this product is that it seals and stains in one step. It's not a fine furniture finish, but it does the job with much less hassle than the traditional stain + poly route. One cheap paintbrush, two brushed nickel knobs, and a few hours later, this is what resulted:

Not bad for about $16, huh? By my calculations, that's a savings of $234. Take it to the bank!

You may remember from this post that we refinished all of the floors in our house before moving in. The floors are in pretty good shape, considering their age (50+ years old).

Here are some before photos, from our sanding/floor refinishing "party". This is in the living room. Note how we taped over the outlets and registers before sanding. Turns out this wasn't really necessary since we got the light-duty sander which wasn't really that messy! A drum sander would have taken more of the old finish off but for what we wanted to accomplish, this worked just fine.

Now here are the long-promised 'afters'!

The floors are lovely and shiny again! This part of the home makeover process really helped to 'freshen' the place up, I thought. It felt clean and rejuvenated.

Here you can also see our lovely rug from Pottery Barn clearance! It was a steal at $129, if I remember correctly! Byron carried this sucker through the Ross Park Mall for me!

And he even vacuumed it too! Isn't he a catch? ;)

Was there anything in your house decorating process that really made the space refreshed?