Office Desk Restored!

Ya'll this is another glorious Craigslist find! I swear Lynchburg has an AMAZING Craigslist! So much so that people from up in Maryland have me scouting for pieces. And the best part about my most recent Craigslist find was that it was FREE. Let me explain...

So Charlie wanted a desk for the house to upgrade his work/gaming setup...we're talking new laptop, two monitors, and new keyboard. Charlie doesn't ask for much...like ever...so I was full-on supportive of this plan plus it meant that I got to search for and fix up a piece of furniture!

How did we get this desk for free? I think the asking price for this desk was originally $100...it's a solid oak desk with some neat features like the legs and pullout trays, but Charlie haggled them down (he is wayyyyy better at negotiating than me) to $50. THEN as fate would have it, while the people were moving the desk the day before we were picking it up, they snapped off a leg. So then they offered it to us for free. Worked for us!

So we were left with a desk with one broken leg and, to our dismay, another leg completely missing. If you look at the photo above, you might notice two things...for starters, there are two legs on the right and only one on the left (hence the missing leg). The other odd thing is that the legs are positioned differently. One hugs the outside of the desk and the other is offset by a couple inches. This is no bueno for all us symmetry lovers out there. Upon laying the desk on its back, we discovered that the left side legs had been reattached to the desk with a thick plywood piece in between to make the desk level. Well this just had to go. Did I mention the burrow holes? Or working with a new paint? Or that Charlie wanted this done by Tuesday (we got the desk on a Friday)? And so the process begins...

1) Wipe it down. I always try to wipe down a piece first to see what kind of condition I'm actually dealing with. Wipe downs usually include a bucket full of warm/hot soapy water and then a dry towel to immediately go over the section I just scrubbed. Its a kind of wax on, wax off system. And it helps me see all parts of a piece, including the usually nasty underside. Here's part of the top...

2) Fix the legs. Easier said than done. To recap, we only had two out of the three original legs for the left side of the desk. The realist in me said that I probably wouldn't be able to find an exact match for the new third leg at Home Depot so we decided to put the two original legs on the front side of the desk and have the outcast leg go in the back.

First, I spent some time and frustration on removing the existing leg and the plywood pieces. Those nails were huge! Essentially, I used a hammer and a whole lot of patience and care to beat the living crap out of the nail until I could pry it free. I had to be sure not to split the thin wood that all these were going through. And I scraped off that nasty glue. Oh and I used a bunch of wood filler to reshape the damaged leg. For this much damage, its not my recommendation to use wood filler, but to use an actual wood piece as the bulk of the repair and then use wood filler around that.

Next I hunted for a similar styled leg at Home Depot and had Charlie shave it down to match the existing. We bought a dowel screw to reattach the other two legs. And yes, they hug the outer sides of the desk now to match the rightside ones. I stained the new leg to match the existing wood as best as possible so that it wouldn't look even more off when everything was painted.

3) Patch up holes. Some kind of insect was definitely making this desk its home at some point. I found these little holes on the left side of the desk and just filled them in with wood filler. Once it dried, I sanded it down and covered the spots with shellac. The shellac was key since I heard that with this new paint I was using, wood filler can show through. Shellac fixes all your bleeding issues!

4) Handle yo' drawers. I took out all the drawers and the pullout trays technically in Step 1 for the wipe down. Obviously, those bulky out of date knobs had to go. But I noticed the inside of the drawers were in fairly good condition which is exactly what I was hoping for. All it took was wiping the drawer insides and pullout trays with Howard's Restor-a-Finish and then sealing it with Howard's Feed-N-Wax (I really appreciate how straightforward this Howard is), and Boom! looked like new. And apparently, I'm terrible and don't have any photos to show you how big of a difference this made! The drawers were set aside for face-painting.

5) Figure out how to use new paint. So I'm going to do a full review/how-to blog post on Miss Mustard Seed paint (MMSP), but essentially, I chose one of the hardest paint colors to work with for my first project. Yay, me! MMSP comes in a powder and then you mix it with water to get the paint. (Again, more details in a separate post.) I painted a spot on my test board first and liked the color so first I painted the drawers and the face of the desk, and then worked my way around the entire piece. I painted two coats.

6) Distress! My favorite part is probably messing up a clean paint job. I'm just not a fan of hiding all that beautiful wood underneath. Plus I think distressed furniture adds some character to a piece.

7) Seal it up. Once the paint was dry, I had to decide on the sealer. I actually used polyurethane on the top and AS clear wax everywhere else. In hindsight, I should've done two coats of polyurethane on the top because the desk hasn't held up too well to hubby's abuse.

8) Hardware. I screwed on some new hardware from my main store Home Depot and then we hauled the desk upstairs to the sunroom, aka Charlie's office, complete with our degrees and an abundance of plants.

Here's the desk with Charlie's full set up! Sorry I'm not skilled enough to photoshop out all the cords.