Old School Desk Project: frame finish and the desk top

 Hi Everyone,

Well, I've made a lot of progress with the desk-I've got a finish on the frame and I also got the old finish off of the desk top. Here's the photos and discussion:

The Frame

You'll remember how beat up the desk frame was when I first started. I honestly think someone at some point must have pushed it over a cliff and landed it on the rocks below! And the frame joinery is loose and wobbly as well. So I spent several days scraping off the old finish with cabinet scrapers and sand paper. I also cleaned up a lot of the scratches and dents on the edges of the frame parts:

Here's what it looked like afterwards:

Here's a photo of the entire frame. It got a lot more sanding after this:

I also found out that the panels are walnut plywood and the frame is a light colored hardwood of some type:

After all the scraping and sanding I sat down and did some research online about how to deal with a desk made out of several different types of wood (there's also poplar). There are a number of blogs and photos of old beat up furniture that has been re-painted, to marvelous effect. Several other projects showed furniture that had been restored and that looked really great too. I even put this questions to friends, should I paint or should I re-finish it?

As I'm not terribly good at painting or selecting colors I decided to re-finish it and bring it back to more of it's original state, with a few up grades thrown in for good measure. As a lot of the damage is still visible, I decided to go with a gel stain that would be less transparent but impart a good solid color. So I purchased a can of General Finishes oil based gel stain and brushed that on and I must say that worked very well. It covered up the damage and it also stained the different woods the same color:

After I took these photos I added a second layer of stain and it looks really nice. More about that later on.
______________________________


The Desk Top

I've looked at the desk top over and over during the years and thought about what the desk would look like when I finally got around to re-finishing it. Here are several photos of the top before I began working on it:

A lot of the finish wore off over the years:

And the edges of the top were really damaged and worn:

LOL, I love this one spot in the center of the photograph. It's a bunch of tiny holes, probably made by pencil or a pen in kind of a square shape. I can imagine a teacher in the past having a really bad day and taking it out on the desk top. I decided to leave that one spot there and not repair it!

I thought seeing as how the old finish was so battered it would easily come right off. It took several hours of scraping with cabinet scrapers to get it off. It was really tenacious:

Here it is with most of the finish removed:

And here is a photo of one of the corners. The edges were really a mess and the corners had been dented too so I sanded and filed these areas with sand paper and a wood file and they came out very well:

After the scraping, I sanded it completely with an orbital sander and then I wiped it down with mineral spirits to clean out the dust and this is what it looks like. You can see that it's book matched walnut veneer with a light colored wood for the edge:

It's really pretty. 

So for this part of the desk, instead of staining it, I'm going to stain only the edging and apply a clear polyurethane finished to the top so the grain will show clearly. 

What's next? My husband the engineer has offered to reinforce the frame with wood glue and screws and I think we'll have a posting about that. While he's doing that I'll be working on the drawers and the shelves and getting some new drawer pulls to replace the old ones. 

Stay tuned.
VW