{"id":597,"date":"2011-01-03T22:49:26","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T02:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/?p=597"},"modified":"2011-12-01T16:04:28","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T20:04:28","slug":"desk-refinishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/desk-refinishing\/","title":{"rendered":"desk refinishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note for the future: when painting objects white<\/a>, consider that maybe a highly-used piece of furniture might not wear well with a white surface. My desk has been looking less and less nice recently – also, I evidently exude paint-thinner from my wrists, since the paint had actually completely worn away in the two spots at the edge of the desk where I rest my arms when typing. I needed to repaint at the very least, and I’m not prone to repeating mistakes. My new plan: strip the paint and ancient varnish, stain the top dark, and re-varnish.<\/p>\n

Conveniently, I got a sander for Christmas! So I started with a chemical stripper to get the paint off – this is what it looked like after two rounds of stripping:
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And then another round of stripping to get varnish off, followed by a wipe-down with mineral spirits:
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The varnish wasn’t really coming up, so I decided to switch from chemical to mechanical: my new sander!
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Look at that – it works! I used 80-grit paper to get the varnish off, then shifted to finer grit papers to get a final finish of 220-grit.
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And then I vacuumed everything in the room to de-dust before starting the refinishing process. I did this whole thing in the studio because I really have no way to get my desk down into the basement alone, so there was a thin layer of sawdust on the entire room, despite the sander’s integrated dust-collection system. Once everything was dust-free, I did a first coat of the same stain from the bookcase project<\/a>:
\n\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tomorrow, I’ll do a second coat, and then it’ll be time for varnish. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note for the future: when painting objects white, consider that maybe a highly-used piece of furniture might not wear well with a white surface. My desk has been looking less and less nice recently – also, I evidently exude paint-thinner from my wrists, since the paint had actually completely worn away in the two spots […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":656,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597\/revisions\/656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}