When we bought our house, the previous owners left an Ikea Brimnes white nightstand behind. Not the most stylish of nighstands and in my opinion a bit boring a cheap looking. But rather than donate it, after watching one too many YouTube Ikea hack videos in my lifetime, I thought I would DIY a new look for it!

There were two many changes I wanted to make to it:

1. Cover the glass panel
2. Change the drawer pull

Covering the glass panel

First, I wanted cover up the frosted glass panel on the drawer as it’s one of the features that really cheapens the look for me and I don’t like that you can kind of see into the drawer (I like to hide my messes). I thought about spray painting the whole thing white or find a thick stock white paper cut down to size to just slip into the space.

I wanted to avoid spray paint, mainly because although not that expensive, about $5 a can, or I would use a white poster board that cost me $0.99.

Using a straight edge and a retractable blade, I cut out a piece that was fractionally larger than the panel I wanted to cover up. The reason for the slightly larger size was so I can shimmy the whole piece into the grove that held the piece of glass and the piece would stay in place without any glue.

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Changing the drawer pull

Next step was to change out the ugly drawer pull for something a little more on trend, “leather” pulls.

I bought a gigantic roll of faux lather fabric from ReStore, the habitat for humanity store, for $5 that I have plans to use for some throw pillows. I have more than enough for my other projects, so I thought I would use a small piece for a drawer pull.

I cut a strip about 1″ wide and 6″ long from my fabric. Taking a leather hole puncher, I folded the strip of fabric in half and punched a hole about 1.25″ from the ends. This ensures you will have identical holes on each end. You can use whatever you have to punch the hole, ice pick or scissors, if you don’t have one of the leather hole punchers.

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The screw posts I used were $1.08 each from Lowe’s and only came in silver, so I used some leftover spray paint to turn them a flat black.

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To save some money you could use the original screws for the handle and turn them backwards and use some nuts to secure the handle in place. However, this does mean you have the point bit of the screw inside the drawer and it may catch on things when you reach in.

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Because the screw posts are 1/4″ in diameter, I had to slightly widen the pre-drilled holes using a a drill.

Finally, insert the female part of the screw post into the holes in your leather strip and then screw it on the drawer. Voila!

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Final thoughts and cost

It’s a significant upgrade to what it looked like before and only cost me less than $5 to do compared to just buying a new one. The drawer pull hack can be used really on any drawer you want to give a little more character and texture, but I really suggest using a screw post to give it a cleaner look and less chance of snagging inside the drawer.

I’ve tallied up the total cost of the supplies and linked to the actual or similar products I used and how much it would cost if you have to buy everything.

• Ikea Brimnes white nightstand – $39.99
• Supplies:
  • White poster board – $0.99
  • Real leather piece – $6.49
  • 1″ screw posts – $2.16 ($1.08 ea)
  • Flat black spray paint – $5.98

My final cost came out to be $3.15 because I had many of the supplies already on hand, but if you were to do this with none of the supplies on hand, the total would be $15.62. Of course, using what you have laying around is always the best!

Do you guys have any good simple DIYs that help freshen up a piece you already have?