What In the Hecking Heck?

Work on the corner desk proceeds...well, I guess it's a decent pace if you're a glacier.  Or maybe a snail, or a tortoise.  I've got two legs fully stripped and sanded now, which took about 8 hours.

(this one is stripped, but not yet sanded)

Isn't that pretty?  I'm an idiot. What I thought was dark wood turns out to be just a stain job so old that it really didn't look like a stain job anymore.  Is it walnut? Redwood? Nope! It's YELLOW: 

mostly-sanded leg on the left, mostly-stripped at
center, two legs I haven't done yet on the right

Hey, I never said I was a professional wood-identifier.

What I do know is that the wood is

• Yellow, with gray and reddish streaks in the grain
• Very soft - I can mar it deeply with just my fingernail
• Light - as big as the whole table is, I can pick it up easily, and I can balance these legs on a finger
• Odiferous!  It smells kind of earthy and warm, and almost sweet - it reminds me of fireplaces and cookies baking.  It's not a "loud" smell;  I can only smell it when I put my nose right up to the wood.  

I have no idea of the age of the piece - I'm guessing 80s or a little bit earlier, from the style; but I have no way to know for sure.  I don't know if it was made locally or not.  There isn't a single stamp or maker's mark anywhere on it, so it might have been a one-off someone made at home?  Unless the original mark was on the drawer that was replaced by the crappy pine drawer that's on it now.

If it was locally made, either by a single person or a local company, it could be either some type of elm, or hackberry.  Both descriptions seem to fit better than anything else I've read; their pictures of the end-grain for American Elm matches these legs almost exactly.

Here's another question: is the top the same wood as the legs?  I won't know until I get there.

Something else I noticed:  while the legs are turned, they're not all one piece.  Both finished legs are made from two pieces of wood sandwiched together lengthwise, then turned on a lathe.  So not super high-end stuff, but maybe not cheap and mass-produced, either? I just don't know.

Not that it matters, anyway. I love this desk, and I can't wait to "meet" it when it's finished.

This is the kind of thing that I love about refurbishing old furniture.  Every single piece is an adventure, or a mystery, or simply an...experience.  (I'm looking at you, vanity table that smelled like dog pee when I sanded you).

More soon. 

The Corner Desk (Before)

Hey, look!  I actually remembered to take a bunch of before pictures!

This corner desk/table was given to me by a friend a couple of years ago.  One of her neighbors put it out with the bulk trash, and she snapped it right up, knowing I'd probably want it.  And she was right:  this is exactly the kind of thing that would cause me to slam on the brakes in the middle of the street to pick up. 

Or it would have been, if it had been nicely finished.  Truth be told I wasn't all that excited about it when I first saw it (but hey, free furniture, amirite?)...until I flipped it over and realized that this thing is solid freaking walnut.  Possibly.  It might be redwood.  I won't know for sure until I get farther along in the stripping process.

30" tall
36 x 36" top surface

1980s, maybe 1970s

Style:  ...?  Generic something.

That drawer knob...no.  It's already in the trash.

Ewwww! 

Bad, fading, cracking paint job; water/sun damage, and some kind of generalized mank that doesn't come off even when I scrub it clean.

Yes, this is clean. 

I know, right?  Gross.

There are four finishes on this thing: 

1. Streaky, gloppy wood stain, incorrectly applied and incomplete
2. White paint or primer
3. Beige/ivory paint - streaky, patchy, gloppy, and drippy
4. Taupe paint - streaky, patchy, gloppy, drippy

And all of it is chipped and peeling.  Thankfully, it's also stripping really nicely so far.

MUWAHAHAHAHA.  Isn't that disgusting?  I love it. 






Please wear your PPEs and have a bottle of vinegar handy when working with paint stripper, people.  You've seen Fight Club, right?  The lye burn scene?  Yeah. That. Scrape and brush away from yourself, not toward, and keep your legs covered.

 Tools and materials:

• Crown Tuff-Strip spray
• thick neoprene gloves
• eye protection
• long pants and closed shoes, or long apron/tarp toga
• vinegar
• plastic scraper
• stiff plastic "wire brush"
• actual wire brush
• rags
• lots of sandpaper

1. Underside of the table top. I thought that the top was splitting, but you can see here that it's just made of planks which are starting to separate.

2. The stain job is visible here a bit.  Nice color, poor execution. Bad stain jobs make me mad. 

3. The original drawer was replaced with a homemade pine one which barely fits into the frame and doesn't slide well.  Can I stain it to match, or will I end up buying a new front?

Weird hardware.  I know now that this square nut and square screw-drive business is fairly common (especially in Europe); but when I first saw this table, I'd never seen such a thing before, and I thought it might mean that this table is really old.  Nope. 

Oops!  Fumbled the phone and accidentally took this. Enjoy the dad sandals.

Back In Action. Lots and Lots of Action.

I haven't been on the blog much the past month.  There were some personal things I had to take care of that occupied 100% of my time for a few weeks; and at the moment I'm neck-deep in a few different projects.  So far, I don't have much to show you, but I figured I'd at least tell you what's going on:

1. Refinishing A Corner Desk 

Once upon a time, someone ruined a perfectly good piece of furniture.  I'm not normally one of the "Never ever paint wood!" people.  I prefer stained to painted, it's true, but I know that either can be done well and produce an attractive piece.  This desk is neither of those things. 

It's a five-legged corner desk with a drawer, made of solid walnut, which was once stained (badly) and then painted (badly!!)  twice.  The paint job is full of drips and mucky thick spots; the top of the desk is cracked all over, which could be age, or lack of proper surface prep in the paint process, or both.  Also, the original drawer was, at one time, replaced at one time with a badly-constructed one made of cheap pine. It doesn't fit the desk well, and is so thick-walled and over-engineered you'd think someone was using it to store very small explosives.

Regardless, overall, it's a potentially gorgeous piece. The walnut wood itself is in great shape, and so far, it's stripping nicely, so I'm hopeful that I can restore this thing to its former glory.  I have no idea how old the desk is - I think at least 80s, maybe 70s (?)  The hardware is oddly shaped, and blackened and rusted with age; but it's sound, and so far I've been able to clean most of it up pretty well.  I haven't seen a maker's mark yet that might give me a clue as to where and when it came from;  I'm hoping I'll find it buried under paint. I hope it wasn't on that missing drawer.

2.  Repurposing the Bicycle Storage Area Dining Room

The desk is part of an ongoing repurposing of the dining room.  Let's be real here:  I don't use a dining room, or own  any dining room furniture.  I eat in front of the TV.  So  I've got this big, empty room which is flooded with natural light, and adjacent to both the kitchen and the living room.  It's well-lit, and there's a ceiling fan. 

Oh, hey, look!  There's that corner desk in the picture, behind my mountain bike.  

Anyway, 90% of the things that were stuffed into this room temporarily have been removed to other locations, and this room is about to become a(nother) shared creative space - a room where I can set up my big easel and start painting again, and where Sylvan can sit and work on her novels on days she doesn't feel like going out to a coffee shop to write.  I'm also about to start remodeling and refinishing a table for her to use as a writing desk. 

3.  Creating An Outdoor Entertaining Space From Scratch

I used to have a really pretty, comfortable back porch space, many years ago.  I'm not entirely sure what happened to it over the years, but, new house: new awesome patio.  Right now I'm only window-shopping (my last surviving patio chair is on it's last legs), hunting around for patio furniture and decorative stuff. 

The Zilker Garden Festival is this weekend.  I haven't been in a few years, but it's an AWESOME little weekend event, and I plan to come home with many, many plants for the patio - decorative flowery things, vegetables for a container garden, maybe a small potted tree? 

Y'all, I bought my very first leafblower this week.  Do you live in central Texas, or somewhere else chock full of Live Oak Trees?  Then you feel me when I say: fuck those messy, crusty, little oak flowers!  And all that nasty, sticky, yellow pollen!!  UGH.  The mountains of stiff leaves aren't helping anybody, either.  They're not even terribly good for compost, because they're so thick and hard that they take forever to break down.  Those leaves and crunchy little flower strings are about to become my bitch.   

I'll have updates over the next couple of weeks on how all this is going.  I'm hoping the corner desk will come first.  I'm having a lot of fun working on it, and I'm excited to see how it turns out! 

*      *      *

Meanwhile, wanna see a gross spider pic?  I thought you would: 

This is Frances.  Frances is a Funnel Web spider (Agelenidae) who lives on my front porch. She's about an inch long, and occupies a corner right next to the front door, by the doorbell.  Needless, perhaps, to say: people don't ring my doorbell anymore. 

Frances is harmless to people (she's not related to the Australian Funnel Web spiders you may have heard about).  She enjoys collecting dead bugs and hiding behind the trim on the siding, and usually cleans out her web long before it reaches this embarrassing state.  Bad Frances. 

Frances has an upstairs neighbor named Rapunzel who has a web about three feet up the wall.  I don't know what kind of spider she is.  She's much pointier in the leg and rounder in the body, and a bit larger.  I think she's some sort of false widow, but I haven't gotten a really good look at her just yet. 

Anyway, back soon!