The History
About a year ago, I spotted a desk at a garage sale for $5. It had an interesting shape, so I decided to buy it. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but that wasn't important at the time. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of what it used to look like, but it was basically badly painted with a cherry colored paint/stain. The first thing I had to do was strip off all the paint, fill holes/gouges, sand it and prime it. This process took a long time because of all the molding and detail. It sat in this state for about a year looking sad and pathetic. Since its residence was in my Nightmare Before Christmas room, I decided I would paint it to match. Here are some pictures form the first part of the project:

  • The Beginning - This is the only before picture I have. I have just started working on the left side
  • Left Side 1 - Initially, the crooked hill was going to be blue
  • Left Side 2- The pumpkins look like they are floating and highlights on the hill are too big
  • Left Side 3 - For the most part, this is the finished left side
  • Right Side 1 - The right side has Zero and his dog house
  • Front 1 - I had a hard time deciding what to put on the front of the desk. After much debating with my mother and Dan, I decided on doing a gate.
  • Front 2 - The gate alone was too boring though, so I added the cats an the walls
  • Front 3 - Everything looked flat, so I added highlights and shadows and voila, the front was done. I still hadn't decided what to do with the yellow strips on the front of the desk.

The Top
Nothing gave me more trouble than the top of this desk. It was initially going to have an orange moon on the top in a similar fashion as the box. So, I drew a circle on the top of the desk and painted it orange. First, it took literally 11 coats to get the orange to cover the pecil guidelines I had drawn (note to self: erase). Then after I painted the orange, I painted the purple around it. My next issue was how to get the wording onto the desk. I am not very good at drawing letters and I wanted it to be perfect.

So, I went to Office Max (free ad!) and enlarged the box top to the correct size and bought carbon paper. When I got home, I proceeded to trace the letters onto the circle. What I ended up with was a big mess. My hand pressing on the paper had made black smudge marks all over the circle. Given my experience with trying to cover the pencil marks, I knew I could not paint orange over the smudges.

I had no experience in removing carbon from latex paint. I tried water, but this didn't do anything except smear the carbon and some of the paint, latex being a water based paint. Next I tried soapy water, this didn't work either. I decided to try 409 (another free ad), which also didn't work. I was running out of ideas, so I tried to think of what removed carbon from paper....an eraser! I went and fetched my trusty eraser and started to erase and the carbon started coming off, but then so did the paint. As it turns out, 409 is a paint remover/loosener. So, now I had a paint peeling mess.

I started peeling off the paint so I could start over from scratch and it was very easy at first but started to become impossible to peel. Apparently, the effects of the 409 only last so long. So, I had to keep reapplying the 409 periodically until I got all of the paint peeled off. Once all the orange paint was removed, I decided to prime the circle to avoid my eleven coat issue from the first time. After applying the primer, I started to questioning the use of orange for the circle and after accquiring a couple of opinions, I decided to change the color to the light gray-blue used elsewhere in the desk.

So, I painted the circle blue and reached the point where I had to get the letters onto the desk again. I tried to think of an alternate method to the carbon paper, but nothing was going to work. So I devised a clever way of minimizing the smudging. I cannot reveal the secrets to this method, as I have submitted a patent application for it. Everything was going along smoothly until I got to the word Christmas. At that point I realized that the word Before was crooked and was too low. Luckily, an eraser works when 409 has not been recently applied to the paint. I erased the words and retraced them correctly and all was well. So, 4 coats of black paint on the letters and some touchups later, the top was finally done.

Finishing
All I had to do after that was paint the insides and the bottoms, touch-ups and varnish. I am not one to gloat normally but damn this desk looks good. Here is the finished product. These are the brushes I used for most of the desk. They are very small.



courtney@dogpower.net