The Making of a Manly Desk

As I promised yesterday, here is the redo of our Treasure Chest Desk and chair.

It started off looking very old and very girly.

But this desk was for my 11 year old son.  So we needed to modernize it and give it some testosterone.

So before you start any wood working project—you should always prep your surface for painting.  Usually that means SANDING.  I HATE SANDING.  Like with a passion.  But I wanted a good paint job .  So I tried the cheaters route and used this:

I put a little on a cloth and wiped it all over the surfaces of the chair and the desk.  To be honest—I have no idea if it worked well or not.  The paint job turned out great so I guess it didn’t hurt it.  I really should have tested one drawer front with it and one without to have a side by side comparison.  But I didn’t.  So for now we will all just pretend that it worked great and I didn’t waste $6 on this stuff.

Next came the paint.  First we put on our very attractive spray painting masks which my husband makes me wear because of the massive amounts of spay painting I do.  He doesn’t want me losing any more brain cells than I already have.  He shouldn’t worry, I don’t have much to lose!

I found the perfect color of spray paint for this boys desk.  It is a dark grey and it happened to come in the Rust-oleum ultra 2x the coverage in gloss.

The gloss part was not my favorite.  But sometimes you have to sacrifice your finish of choice to get your color of choice.  And I do LOVE the color.

And can I also say that I LOVE the double the coverage paint.  This is the first time I had used it and I am in LOVE!!!  It really means what it says about double the coverage.  What normally would have taken a billion coats and 12 cans of spray paint (ok…I exaggerate.  But it would have taken a lot) took 2 light coats and only 3 cans of paint for both the chair and the desk—and I still had some left over!)

So here is the chair:

Before:                                             Middle:

 

After:

And then came the drawers: (Sorry about the shadowy pictures in my garage)

Before:

Middle:

Spraying the hardware with some ORB:

And After:

Then I took some scrap book paper and made some drawer liners for him in fun colorful prints:

 

And ta-da.  A very masculine looking desk for a very deserving 11year old.

Next time I will give you a tour of his new room and a breakdown of how much it all cost. 

That should be fun!