Mom and I were out shopping for furniture for her new condo the other day. She didn’t find anything, but I found this adorable little writing desk that I ended up getting to use for my painting instead of my current folding table.
The paint was in terrible shape so I wanted to strip it to bare wood and refinish it!
Now for the paint stripping…
I went to lowes and got some stain that I was assured would neutralize the yellow in the wood. It turned out just staining the wood back to its original yellow color and I hate it.
I really wanted a more gray finish, so I found some white paint in the garage and whitewashed it.
The whitewashing just didn’t work at all. The color was a weird peachy white and I hated that also. I dug out all of my teal sample paints to see if I liked any of the colors to use on the desk. Between the white wood and the bright teals the whole situation was just way too “beach house.” So… Now I’m going to try to stain the wood dark brown.
The dark brown looked fantastic! *BUT* because of all the layers of paint and stain…. it wasn’t drying. I slowly realized that it wasn’t ever going to dry, even if I buffed it out with turpentine a few times. So, unfortunately, the only solution I saw was to just strip the desk and sand it alllll over again. I’ve now spent almost a week on this cheap desk to get back to where I started. Finally I got the finish to a point where I could paint it with primer.
All I’ve learned so far from this experience is that I hate sawdust and furniture refinishing will NOT be my new hobby!
Since I’ve committed to painting the entire desk now I went back to Lowe’s and just picked the darkest green they had on the wall and went with it. It’s Sherwin Williams Shade Grown.
Because I’m currently obsessed with birds I ordered a pair of cute pink bird drawer pulls off Amazon. I immediately dropped one and broke it in half. (Awesome…) After gluing it back together I finally got them installed on the desk.
Because this is going to be my art desk I needed to do something for lighting. I found these battery powered LED strip lights and installed them inside the desk.
The desk itself is done now! Yay! But now I need a place to sit! I saw a cute little vintage folding chair at the flea market a while ago and went back to get it!
Underneath the ugly beige flowers was an extra foam pad and underneath the extra foam was some vintage red vinyl. Red doesn’t match my theme so I went to the store and got an extra 2” thick piece of foam to make this chair extra comfy. I settled on some pink with birds fabric that was kinda cute for the new cover. I feel like I kind of panic chose the fabric in a rush to make this thing usable so maybe I’ll redo the entire chair later.
