Every 2 drawer bedside table looks good on the shop floor. It’s only when you’ve had it on your bedroom floor for a month that you discover whether the drawers function properly or whether you’re now that sort of person who violently pulls open a jammed drawer in the morning and curses at furniture. Runner quality is the thing nobody mentions. If they’re cheap plastic ones with no ball bearings then expect the drawer to collapse at a weird angle the second it’s opened past halfway, before one side eventually pops out of the track entirely. Solid metal runners with bearings, or nicer ones with soft close mechanisms if you’re feeling spendy, are what separates a smoothly operating drawer from a drawer that will make you negotiate with it every.single.time. you open it. Gap aside, surface space is more important than anyone lets on when you’re buying a bedside table sight unseen.
You want space for at least a lamp base, a cup of water, the book you’re lying about reading and ideally some buffer zone so none of those things feel like they’re going to fall on the floor should you nudge the table in your sleep.
Anything under 40cm square and it feels like a juggling act as soon as you throw your phone charger on there too.
Larger tabletops also means you’re less likely to knock your water glass with your elbow, an annoyance you only appreciate if you’ve had to do that and reach for a new glass at 2am. Speaking of elbows. Height is something people don’t factor in and then regret forever. The top of your bedside table should line up with the top of your mattress, give or take an inch. Nobody cares about lining it up with the top of your duvet once you have four blankets and three pillows on top of you every night. Buy too low and you’re wrestling yourself onto the ground every time you need something from it, buy too tall and you might as well be sliding your phone onto the top. Measure mattress to floor, not pillow to floor.
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Trust me.
Double check before you buy.
Buying a bedside table isn’t difficult, once you’ve got used to knowing what you need it out to be you’ll spend forever trying to explain that back to Amazon. The second drawer is worth it. Trust me on this. You suddenly have a legitimate top and bottom drawer division, bottom drawer for ‘leave-things-I-rarely-use-in’ top drawer for actually-using crap. Suddenly your bedside table starts to act less like junk shoved into a drawer with a lamp on top of it and starts to feel like actual storage for the stuff you need at night. That’s really what we want here, isn’t it? Good runners that don’t get stuck, a top that comfortably sits your trash pile from nighttime brain activity and a height that actually aligns with your bed. Nail those 3 things and colour, finish and handles are purely aesthetic factors on something that was already functional.
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