As you may or may not know, I am still hunting for my foot-in-the-door-but-amazing design job. And have been feeling a bit disillusioned. So to stave off negativity and keep me creating, I have been giving myself projects. All sorts of things, like re-hanging the art in my room, random hand-drawn type pieces, learning web design and crocheting a blanket (as it turns out, I’m not so good at/dedicated to crochet. So Mama Bear has been taking the helm on that one). One of the more major projects I gave myself was a new desk. The old desk has been floating around for years, and while very good at having all of my crap piled on top of it for months at a time, wasn’t a particularly good work space for several reasons. One is that it’s ugly. The other is that because of the drawers down one side, I couldn’t cross my legs while I was working. Which sounds really silly, but is a big deal for me. I almost always sit with my legs curled up underneath me, for goodness sake I sleep cross-legged sometimes.

All of this boiled down to the fact that I needed a new desk, and I wanted it to be awesome. Somewhere that I would look forward to sitting down, somewhere that would encourage my creativity not kill it. I went through several options, with two front runners. 1) Source a door/slab of wood (much easier for me than most as my Dad is a builder) and purchase some trestle legs from Ikea and go for the stripped back industrial look which would work splendidly as a counter point in my room (This idea was much encouraged by style conscious lady Jess of We Are). Or 2) Buy an old kitchen table off eBay and go for the rustic farmhouse kitchen look.

I actively searched for both options, but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. The game changer was when I went to my local Vinnies. I found this kind of dodgy but incredible Queen Anne style desk. Definitely a cheap knock off of some antique, it was just sitting there all scratched with broken drawers waiting for me to adopt it. $45 and one ute ride later, it was all mine!

First thing I did was sand back the scratched varnish. I figured out at this point that it was a mix of decent wood, shit wood and veneer. Because of this, I was careful not to sand to much because I still wanted a smooth surface to work with. This took the longest time out of anything. I did the top with an electric sander (Thanks Dad!), but because of the angles I had to do most of it by hand with a sanding block.

Then I applied a primer ( I used Taubmans Easy Coat Prep) so that if I had missed any spots of varnish during the sanding process the paint would still stick there. I also found that the wood soaked up the primer something chronic. I worked out later that I used roughly twice as much primer than paint to cover the same surface area.

Once this was dry, I did a light sand to get rid of any little nobbly bits and the bigger streak marks, bought myself a roller and a small paint brush and attacked it with the white. I used Taubmans again, and picked a slight off-white. I didn’t want cream, but to have just straight white would have looked artificial and weird. After two coats, I was pretty impressed. My original intention was to sand the paint back again and create a distressed affect. But I liked the solid colour so much I decided to leave it.

Now for the fun part! I introduced colour. The colour choice was a hot topic. My original thought was a seafoam green/blue, but as my room has one bright turquoise feature wall I moved away from it. It was then going to be hot pink, but I thought that while it would look amaze, I would probably grown out of it/get sick of it in a year or two. So I settled on yellow. Happy, buttery, sunshine yellow. I have been in love with yellow for a while now, using it in quite a lot of my design work. But I haven’t found a more permanent way of having it in my life until now. I can’t wear yellow because of my complexion, so this seemed like an excellent way of having some happy colour in my daily life.

I did the inside of the drawers as a surprise colour pop, and then thought it looked a bit lonely, and decided to also paint the indent detail around the bottom edge. This was the point that my sister and best friend decided to help (nobody was interested in being involved when it was all boring sanding and white!). We finished and decided it was still missing something and so added yellow to the bottom section of each leg. And still it looked unfinished, so we taped it up again and added more yellow to one of the routed edges of the top. And finally were happy that it looked balanced and complete.

I am so happy with the result. It makes me smile every time I look at it, and has the added bonus of being much wider than my other desk so it is the perfect place for drawing and other crafty/arty pursuits.

The only thing is that now I have to do the chair to match! Stay tuned for the final duo.