Refurbished Oak Desk

Yaaaaaaaaay it's done!  It took a long time.  Yes it did. I thought the desk was a poor buy (even though it was only 25 dollars) because the top had this gross piece of vinyl on it, and parts of the desk are plywood with veneer overtop.  Fortunately, I managed to rip the vinyl off and the top doesn't look half bad, "rustic" let's call it.  Besides, once it was painted black, who could tell if it's plywood + veneer instead of solid wood... no one! Here is the

   Before:

After:

Please forgive me for the slightly terrible photos, my iPhone camera is a trooper and the only one I have!  Here is what I did to the desk to get it less orange and more black, less vinyl and more wood:

1. Sand every piece possible (very gently on the veneer parts)

2. Rip off the vinyl and sand the top down as much as possible, oil with lemon oil. 

3. Prime.  With oil based primer. 

4. Paint (latex) a lovely black (Opening Night from Home Hardware)

5. Put on some new hardware (3.99 cup pulls from Home Depot)


6. Seal with a satin finish polyurethane  like this one:

Here is a gross photo of the gross vinyl. Bleh we hates it.

A hefty amount of scraping and sanding was required to get all the old glue off: 

There is still some work to be done ... I would like to put a better varnish on the top to make it durable.  Also to add some decorative moulding around the edges, to protect them, and also to protect us from splinters! (I already got one from it and it hurt REAL bad).  There is also some staining to fix in one of the drawers, presumably from some devilish little tyke who left the lids off of their gel pens ...

I want to do a post on the many uses of baking soda because NOTHING lightened the ink stains better than it did.  The other drawers aren't nearly as bad 

Here is the desk top up close

You may be wondering about the cut out piece in the middle? So am I.  My genius father speculates it was either an attempt at a cut out for a typewriter back in the day, or a poor attempt to fix a cut out for a typewriter.

Please ignore the cardboard on the window as seen in the photo below, it was exceptionally sunny out and it was either take the photo right there and then or take it when I returned to Toronto in January, so just deal with it.

One last before and after for posterity.