Never will you understand my irritation when waking up half-asleep trying to find your phone charger while also contorting yourself into a half-human pretzel shape to plug it into your outlet because your nightstand is too far away or happened to turn your bedroom into a minefield. I dealt with this problem for around 8 months while living in my flat in Chorlton. I refused to accept that my furniture choices just sucked.
It’s “efficiently proportioned” according to my estate agent who sold me the flat (Translation: You’ll feel like you’re living in a tin of sardines). It’s around 10ft x 8.5ft and came with a double bed that left me with under 20 inches of space on either side. Eventually, I resorted to taking a tape measure and measuring the bedroom myself to see why I kept stubbing my shin on the side of this enormous nightstand I bought blindly.
Sound familiar? I tend to look at furniture at IKEA and think “damn that’s solid” and don’t realise that what I’m actually looking at is basically a small dresser posing as bedside tables.
Which leads me too nicely built.
Solid pine, tons of storage space, looked mature, grounded and adult. But as a nightstand? Disaster.
It made my bedroom feel like I was living in some sort of storage unit with too much furniture. Plus trying to walk to my closet entailed me doing this stupid jig every.single.morning. My girlfriend at the time even told me I looked like I had an extensive library I was waiting to store next to my bed.
Which wasn’t too far from the truth. Finding a new nightstand became somewhat of an obsession. You would think it’d be simple – go get a smaller nightstand and call it a day.
But most retailers seem to operate off the idea that everyone lives in giant Victorian estates with spacious rooms. Either the nightstands were MASSIVE and bulky or were tiny tables that looked like they’d topple over if you put anything weighty on them. Like…I spent too many nights perusing furniture store websites becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of sensible options.
What ultimately worked for me was when I stopped looking at “nightstands” and started looking at narrower console tables. A totally different category of furniture but the proportions and width worked absolutely perfectly for what I was looking for. I ended up getting this bad boy from West Elm – their Penelope Night Stand in White Oak.
Will likely take down soon because they always do that, but it works. The measurements are spot on: 24 inches wide by only 8 inches deep, and 26 inches tall. That 8″ width is what made all the difference.
Gives you enough room – I can fit my lamp, some books, phone, and a small bowl for my watch and wallet – but doesn’t take up nearly 50% of your room. Even the single drawer is deceivingly big and allows me to hide junk that used to clutter up my surface. Think: charging cables, hand sanitizer, extra light bulbs etc.
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Putting it together wasn’t too bad, though I will say I fell victim to the classic pitfall of setting it up at bed height initially. Thought it’d be the easiest to grab stuff at. Wrong.
When you’re laying in bed reaching for something at bed height you’re essentially feeling around blindly. I broke my water glass 3 nights in a row until I realised my mistake and instead lifted the entire piece up about 4 inches using furniture risers I already had kicking around my flat. Much better.
High enough where I can see what I’m reaching for, but not so high that I have to lift my whole body off the bed. It also got rid of the issue of whether or not I had enough room to walk past my old nightstand. Before this I literally had to shuffle around my massive table every time I wanted to get to my closet or window.
Now I have plenty of room to walk by – not tremendously spacious but enough so that I can walk straight past without doing the furniture shuffle. Who knew inches made such a difference when you’re working with such small dimensions. Storage wise I was worried I’d lost space, but overall I find that this design made me way more organised – which is probably a good thing.
Instead of letting clothes and random items pile up all over the place I now make sure everything has a home. I.e. I keep trinkets in a wooden tray to corral smaller items, and for some reason everything looks cleaner than my previous method of “oh there’s space, just dump it on the table.” Speaking of style, it even opened up my options there.
Because the table doesn’t crowd your space visually you can get a little crazier with the accessories. I picked up this nice ceramic lamp from a local pottery shop and my guy told me it would look ridiculous on my old bulky table; but is just enough of a flair for this little table. The scale of this table allows your lamp to be the showstopper, as opposed to fighting with other oversized furniture.
Even cleaning became easier.
Since my old table took up so much physical space in my room vacuuming meant moving my actual bed around, unplugging my lamp, you name it…made it a big ordeal. Thanks to the slim profile I can now roll my vacuum pretty easily around and underneath my table without moving things around.
There’s not really much I don’t like about my new set up. The only con may be that now you can’t just leave random junk around. Places where you used to dump books, cups, loose coins, and who-the heck-knows what else overnight suddenly don’t have enough space.
It’s probably bad for your organizational habits – but hey maybe that’s good! Forces you to only keep around what you truly need by your bed and not just toss random things everywhere. Either way, after six months of living with it, this was one of those small changes that ended up having a bigger impact than I originally gave credit for.
How your room looks and functions. Not life changing – but definitely makes life better each day. Sometimes the answer isn’t always a clear solution, sometimes it’s just the option that works so well you forget there was a problem to begin with.
