Naptime Project

It all started with this.  I found this desk cheap on Craigslist. It's old. It's wood. It needed some love. I needed a new desk for my new office.  So Cupcake and I went on an adventure, hoped we wouldn't get kidnapped and picked it up.  It had a little bit of water damage on it (look at the bottom left), but I thought I could handle it.  So it came home with us.

It sat in the garage for a few weeks, causing me to have to park in the driveway (and scrape ice off my car when I left the house in the morning) and I worked on it while Cupcake napped.  I started out with some eco-friendly paint stripper that didn't smell.  It also didn't work well.  Or really at all.  I was scraping, scraping, scraping and the paint was just sticking, sticking, sticking.  I took the orbital sander to it, but that just made a huge mess (and who knows how old that paint is, lead maybe?).  It was off to the home improvement store for me to get some real paint stripper.  What a difference the stinky stuff made!  That paint was just falling off the desk!!!  I should have used it sooner.  It would've gotten my car back in the garage one, even two weeks sooner maybe! 

4 layers of paint later, the desk was stripped! There were a few spots where I had to smooth out where there was water damage.  And then it was time to remove the gold paint off the drawer pulls.  I decided to keep the existing pulls because they were kind of funky, they were silver underneath and I didn't want to fill and redrill holes in all the drawers.  These pulls require two holes that are close together. Definitely not a standard size.  I soaked those bad boys in the stripper, but they also seemed to have 4 layers of paint on them.  It was a mess!  I scrubbed and soaked and scrubbed and soaked and unfortunately when I got down to the metal I just couldn't get it shined up.  Blah!

So the desk was stripped, patched, sanded, and cleaned and brought inside to paint!  I couldn't handle freezing my butt off in the garage (December in Ohio, not the best time for a furniture stripping project) while working on it............and I didn't want to have to deal with a freezing cold car anymore (I'm spoiled).  Here is the finished product!


Excuse the mess!  I was excited to move in right away.  I painted it black in eggshell finish.  I think used a overhead projector to project the swirl image onto the desk.  I outlined it with pencil and then painted the design with black, satin paint. I also painted the top of the desk with the satin paint.

I didn't plan on having such shiny drawer pulls, but they needed paint. There was no way around it.  They got a coat of primer, followed by a coat of metallic spray paint (because that is what I had on hand).

I had originally intended this desk to be a sewing desk and a friend is supposed to give me a desk to use as my office desk, but I need the office desk more so this will do for now.  If I get another desk this one will be headed to the sewing room.

Now I just need to finish working on my chair........................