Lyttle House in the Suburbs: Desk #1

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Desk #1

I would have taken before pictures of this desk, but I had about 3 hours or so to completely redo it, so use your imagination. I have a solid wood desk probably 30-50 years old. I've had it about 10 years and it was left in the basement of my former house which I bought when the house was 50 years old from it's only owner. Anyways. It was a nice, solid desk with a great design. 3 huge drawers, then you could swing out an extension and legs to make it into a desk. Awesome, right? Well, there are some supports on the bottom of the desk extension and a few months ago the wood split where it's screwed in. I screwed in a few more screws but knew something would need to be done. Remember when I installed that cabinet door to make an arts & crafts space in my kitchen? Well, while I was there I grabbed a $5 big cabinet door that looked wide enough for fixing my desk. I finally got around to testing it.

First, I removed the faulty wood (I'm hanging on to it because I see more repairs to this piece of furnature in my future). I cut the cabinet door down to size with a saw (as luck would have it, the width was about perfect with the desk and the height it needed to be trimmed was just under the hole that was left from the cabinet handle pull). I also had to (after much sadness that I no longer have my router and really didn't see having time to borrow one and get it right) cut off the edge of the remaining desk (it had been routed so that it had a fully routed edge all the way around and then the underside of the push out part was routed to fit-excellent design, but I've got 3 kids and about 3 hours for this project). I then reused the hardware to put the hinges and the legs on to my cabinet door. My pine, varnished cabinet door. Not at all like the dark, peeling drawers I was attaching to. I lightly (and quickly) sanded with some 60 grit sandpaper and my sander to rough it up and got out the extra 1/2 a quart of brown paint from my office (that's where this goes, it may as well match). It successfully covered the fact that they are completely different wood!

Today I took some fancy, heavy weight wrapping paper I picked up at Tuesday Morning (for those out of the area, imagine a Ross or TJ Maxx, but more household goods than clothing) for just such a project. It was $2.00 for the roll and heavier than regular wrapping paper and, more importantly was larger than my 12x12 scrap booking paper, these drawers are approx 15x15 so 12x12 paper wasn't going to cut it. I cut the paper approx to size (this project used up almost the entire roll) then laid it in the drawer and trimmed with an exacto knife. If I had had a straight line grid on the back of my wrapping paper I probably would have skipped this step, but I can't cut straight to save my life. I then dabbed some rubber cement ($3 from Hobby Lobby, had it on hand) around the edges so it won't slide around (I hope). I then drilled new holes in the drawer fronts and attached cute $1 drawer pulls I got at Michael's awhile back. If I had more time, I would have filled in the holes from the old pulls (they were bent and grungy metal, trust me, this is a big improvement) and painted over them. I'll probably do that when I need to do the next repair on this furniture, but again, 3 kids, 3 hours....

I love how it turned out even with the quick job I did on it. It's by no means professional, but it looks nice and is functional again!

Folded down...