One day I was walking home, and I saw this desk next to the dumpster in this little parking lot area for one of the buildings on the block north of me. I went in for a closer look, and it was pretty ugly, but not broken. I lifted it up, and discovered it was sitting on roller feet, and was lightweight. A little too bulky to carry home on my own, so I enlisted some help for that.Once I had it, I starting thinking about what to do with it. I looked at different hardware online, because the plastic/metal/wood combo had to go. I considered painting it plain white. I considered staining it. I knew I had to sand it down first, it did have some old finish on it in the grains, and a couple rough corners. So I took a trip down to Clark Devon Hardware (so helpful!), and picked up some things that I thought might be necessary.
After laying down the cheap plastic dropcloth on my living room floor (I have no basement or garage) I got to work with sanding. Sanding is a lot of work! It took longer than I expected it too, and I ended up with some sore muscles the first time I worked on it- my legs from crouching for a couple hours, and my shoulder and back from the continuous sanding back and forth. Not in as decent of shape as I thought!
About halfway through sanding, a coworker recommended using a stripper- he said that it was really easy, you just wiped it on and wiped it off. It was pretty easy to put it on, as he had said, but getting it all off was a little more complicated. I ended up having to scrape and sand even more to get it all off, and even still, there were still some grains that I just couldn't get to. It was somewhere at this point that I used woodfiller to close up the holes on the bottom drawers so that they would be smooth once I put in the new single bolt hardware.
Once I finally had finished the sanding, I had to make some hard decisions about what to actually finish it with. I was still torn between painting and staining. I wasn't that crazy about painting anymore, but there were still some really deep grains that had retained the previous finish; using a beltsander in my living room would have been a little much, I WAS trying to maintain half of the room as a usable living room. However, my dad recommended that I might as well stain it, if that was what I wanted with it, and if it looked really bad after that, I could always just paint over it. So, I went with stain.
After looking at all of my options, I chose the "Golden Pecan" color, from the 'minwax polystain' collection- theoretically, you should be able to stain and polyurethane with one product. Due to my novice status as a woodworker (I haven't done any of this since middle school) I suckered myself into buying the 'pre-stain' product, for a 'more beautiful, even finish'. I don't know how much it actually affected the finished product, but I used it. I then stained.
When the stain had dried, I decided that I really didn't want to go with another coat of stain, as recommended, I liked the color it was at. But, it didn't quite have what I felt to be an appropriate coating of polyurethane. There were still some places where the polyurethane coating was thin, and where I would feel uncomfortable putting something wet on (for example, there is a nice cold MGD next to me right now), so I headed down for yet another trip to Clark Devon, and bought a little can of polyurethane. AND MAN DOES THAT STUFF STINK! I put all the fans I own on high in my living room, and then took myself out for a movie. Good thing I don't have roommates, they would have really pitched a fit over that.
And then it was just waiting the 24 hours for it to dry completely; after about a day and a half and borrowing a drill from a friend and making the holes for the last two knobs, I moved the desk to its current position in my 'dining' room, another day later, I started moving all my art supplies into it. And now it's useful again (did I mention that the state I found it in, involved some check book ledgers from the 60s? clearly hadn't been used in a while)!
For the complete set of photos, from start to finish- this was a request from various people I talked to mid-project- go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/68414952@N00/sets/72157627282157530/
