Painting Ikea Malm Bed

I was tired of my old malm birch veneer bed.  After some years, the birch turned into an ugly yellow (from direct sunlight…oops) and had some chips here and there.  I want to get a new bed, to upgrade in size, but can’t really decide on one yet.  For the mean time, I decided to play with my existing bed and see what I can do.  I saw a great tutorial on painting Ikea furniture here and used that as my guide.   

The only step I added was using plaster (since I had some around) to fix some of my dings on the headboard.  Then I primed the bed with two coats.  I waited maybe half an hour between coats.

After priming the bed, I was ready to paint it into an awesome new non-ikea-color but didn’t have the guts to do it in the end.  Instead, I painted the bed white to match my white malm dresser.  The tricky part here was matching Ikea’s white paint.  I found that Behr’s off white paint came pretty close to my dresser but there might be better choices too.  I used less than a quart of paint.

So far, I am happy with the results.