It’s no secret that Kyle and I are big into DIY. It’s also no secret that we’re still kind of new to it and we don’t always end up with a finished product we’re in love with. I’m about to share with you a bad DIY. Baaaaaaaaad, bad, bad. It’s actually kind of embarrassing but I think it’s important to share our failures as much as we share our successes. Nobody is perfect and it would be exhausting to try to come off that way.

I mentioned that Kyle built a couple of nightstands for us. We love these nightstands. The nightstands themselves are not the embarrassing part.

Let’s talk about stain for a minute. At this point, we’ve had several projects that involved stain and they’ve all turned out pretty well as far as we’re concerned.

Pro tip: do your research. I’m sure you can see where this is going…

Normally, we just grab pine from the lumber section for building furniture because we like the look of it and it’s relatively cheap. For this project, we went with edge-glued aspen project boards from Lowe’s because they’re flat and easy to work with. I figured they would take stain just the same but spoiler alert: I was wrong. So very wrong.

We prepped the surface with wood conditioner and then applied the stain and it looks…well, not great. It’s extremely uneven and the brush strokes are crazy bad.

After letting out my frustration via some highly inappropriate language and consulting with the Google, I discovered that I wasn’t alone. While these project panels are stain grade, they just don’t take stain as nicely as what we’re used to working with. Had we done our research, we would have most likely opted to use different materials or read up on the best way to stain this particular wood and then we would be using the nightstands. Sadly, we made some assumptions and are continuing to use a filing cabinet and a trunk by our bedsides. It kind of feels like we’re living in a dorm room.

We do have a plan to salvage what we have but they won’t be going in our bedroom. This means another trip to Home Depot to get the flattest lumber we can find. Oh, and it also means Kyle has to figure out how he built them in the first place since he did it sans project plans.

In other news, we’ve been mildly productive this week but we had another DIY fail that I’ll talk about later. Let’s hope this weekend is more successful.