DIY | IKEA Bedside Table Hack – Gold & Marble

I’ve got a liiiittle bit addicted to homeware recently. Instead of buying clothes, underwear and sewing supplies (although they may still be finding their way into my shopping baskets every so often), I’ve found myself browsing homeware more and more often. It doesn’t help that Ben’s mum and dad have recently moved house and are buying all new home stuff, so in helping them choose, I’m spotting all sorts of things I want for myself!
It’s been just more than a year now since we’ve moved into our own house after living in rented houses for about 5 years, and we’re only just getting into the swing of really owning the house and having the ability to drill holes in walls wherever we like, paint things in crazy colours and even replace bathrooms. It’s nice to be able to know that you can invest in your own property rather than it being someone else’s. Okay, so we haven’t actually painted in crazy colours or replaced bathrooms – the bathroom is still a pipe dream and the walls have gone from crazy colours to fairly normal actually – an interesting bright yellow in the hall and stairway to “Elephant Breath” grey, and yellow in the conservatory to sage green. More on the painting another day though as that’s still underway – we’ve got the kitchen cupboards in the works and the downstairs bathroom.

Today’s post is one of those “details” that I keeping banging on about though – something inexpensive which makes all the difference. And this time, it was the table in our hall that needed some attention. Okay, so it’s actually a bedside table…

Back when Ben and I moved into our first rented house together, out of our flat in Newcastle, we were moving from furnished to unfurnished and needed to fill a 2 bedroom cottage on only-just-graduated salaries, so to IKEA we went to buy the cheapest furniture our money could buy. We bought the little Nesna bedside table as an end table for our living room to sit at the end of the sofa – we only had a really small area that needed filling, and it fitted perfectly. I remember this one particularly because I built it completely by myself and was SUPER proud!
And the best bit? It’s only £9!
It’s travelled with us through 2 house moves since then and finally took up residence in our hall as a little table for our WiFi router, phone line, change bowl, keys and other random bits. But it’s not pretty as it is. It’s a very basic table made of fairly flimsy wood (bamboo apparently according to the IKEA listing) and a glass top. I’d never particularly liked it, but it worked.
We decided we needed a nicer table for the hall after we repainted it. The new colour makes the hall look way more sophisticated and grown up, and we wanted to keep it tidy and looking nice. Unfortunately, the area for the table is really small. Everything we saw was either too big or too expensive for what a small piece it was. I kept coming across super pretty metallic looking tables and obsessing over them – you all know how obsessed with copper I am! Then I realised it could be done with what we already had, and very cheaply too…

This weekend, I set up the table in our garden room, along with a can of gold spray paint, an old bed sheet and some marble contact paper. I should also add that we had the doors open and cats safely out of the way, although you may spot them wandering in the video below (woop, video!) – don’t worry, we tucked them away:

Because of course, if there’s a rolled up carpet, they HAVE to be inside it straight away!!

It took me 10 minutes to spray the whole table. I wiped it down first, but I didn’t bother to remove or tape off the glass because I planned to cover the top with marble contact paper – see that below. If I wasn’t covering it up, I would have removed the glass or taped the edges – as you can maybe see, the spray does get onto the glass!

Now, exciting times, I’ve made a video! I have plans for more, but wanted to start with a non-talking one (as I’m SUPER awkward on video – we tried making a fridge review one the other day…stay tuned as I may publish it soon…)

The marble contact paper was easy to apply once measured out and scraped flat down – my parents actually arrived as I was doing this bit and were worried by my DIY skills. It turned out just fine though!!
Now spruced up with a few accessories (lamp from Dunelm, photo frame from Oliver Bonas, cactus from B&Q, copper bowl from Olivas Bonas) and in place, I’m really impressed with it. It’s just what our hall needed, cost less than £25 in total (with a table that’s like 6 years old now) and took about 20 minutes in total with around an hour of drying time in between spraying and putting down the contact paper.
Here’s the finished piece:

Have you done any DIY around the house recently?
Any IKEA hacks I can have a look at?