Ugly desks make great projects!
I guess you couldn’t ask for an uglier project by the looks of it. That’s how it usually starts. You have to see the potential in the piece before it can reach it’s potential. The picture below is of one of the drawers on this old desk before being restored. As you can see it started with just an ugly varnish like you would see on a typical piece of office furniture. I feel like this color varnish dates the desk and also gives it a certain stigma of being stuck in a stuffy office somewhere. How boring would that be?
When you look at it closely you can see that it’s already scratched and scuffed. It had chips of the original varnish in it and had really out lived it’s usefulness. It was distressed but not in a good way. In fact it was distressing to look at!
However with little effort, sanding and surface preparation an old piece of furniture can have new life breathed into it. When it comes to surface preparation you obviously want it to be clean of any oily residue so a quick cleaning doesn’t hurt. That may not be necessary in all cases but it depends on where the piece came from.
Your not supposed to have to sand with Annie Sloan Chalk paint but call me old fashioned, I still think it’s a good practice. Usually we do a light sanding at least with about a 220 sand paper or finer. Any courser than that and you run the risk of deep scratches. You might say that’s the purpose of distressing furniture but we don’t want accidental scratches. The purpose of a light sanding is just to help paint stick to it better. There are also some products you can buy to help prepare the surface but more on that in a later post.
After another quick dusting with a rag or even compressed air we move on to the next step. This is where the fun begins! We used Annie Sloan Chalk Paint to finish it and leave it in it’s restored condition. It did a wonderful job at covering the old dark finish and turning it into something to be proud of.
We also had to do restoration on the hardware. Many times when you get an old piece of furniture the hardware is at least scratched up. The worst case senario is that it doesn’t even have hardware or that a couple of drawer pulls are missing. But that wasn’t the case here.
The old handles were removed, cleaned and slightly sanded before being coated with fresh spray paint. After a little more time screwing the hardware back onto it we were finished. You can see below how we distressed it and how well it turned out!
It was a lot of work and required extensive preparation. But in the end I think it turned out better than could be expected. Actually the worst part was delivering it which we agreed to do. We didn’t foresee it but it had to be cared up a difficult stair case with a tight corner. All with out damaging the desk or the home. As you can imagine, we quickly developed a new policy for delivery if it’s done at all.
I hope you enjoyed this article and look forward to the next. Talk to ya soon!