The Full {and Blue} Monty

Posted August 2, 2011 // Guest Bedroom

Yesterday morning you all got a little teal desk tease. Now that he’s all dry and all the hardware is in place we thought we’d share the full desk monty with you today. Are you on the edge of your seat? We’re imagining that you are.

In our customary fashion, here is the before shot of our desk which was a hand-me-down from Amy’s dad.

This desk is nice, heavy, and solid wood. The drawers still work great and it’s a sturdy piece. Good “bones” as they would say. The they who say things like that, that all of us remember.

Despite these “bones” the desk wasn’t without its flaws. The finish was by no means perfect.

Considering it was about 110 degrees outside the day we decided to paint this puppy, we chose to do so in the comfort of our guest bedroom. So we just threw down some drop cloth scraps, from all of our curtain-making which is thankfully done now, removed the drawers (get it, the full monty, he he), the hardware and gave the whole thing a light sanding.

Normally we would have primed this guy with a nice even coat of oil-based, tinted primer. After a lengthy discussion with our paint guy at Triangle True Value, he assured us that their Easy Care paint and primer in one would do the trick with just a light sanding and two coats.

We decided to trust him, and so far believe that he was right.

As you already know, the wife picked a color called Quiver by True Value. No we don’t need this ENTIRE gallon, who knows what she’ll do with the rest of it, but it was f-r-e-e so why not take the whole chalupa right? 

You’ll remember from this past post that True Value likes to hook us up with free paint. We’re happy to accept, especially since this EasyCare stuff is so freggin’ awesome.

Check it out, after just one coat of semi-gloss.

Just as one of our thoughtful readers asked us last week, we had a little conundrum when installing our new hardware. Thankful for standard 3″ wide drawer pulls, we were still torn between two finishes: classy bronze or cool and modern lucite. 

Trip Numero Uno: World Market

Amy almost hit the floor, she was so happy when she thought she found the “perfect – OMG” drawer pulls. They had bronze corners and lucite centers. The love child of her two handle crushes.

I couldn’t find them online to post a picture but they were nice, so nice that World Market wanted to hold on to them with a $12.99 each price tag. We needed six of these muggas so it was going to be a bit tough to spent almost $80 on half of our hardware. We kept moving. There was only a mild temper tantrum as a result.

Adventure Number Two: Lowes Home Improvement

Lowes had some nice lucite drawer pulls for just north of $6 each with matching knobs for $3+. Had we not seen what could have been at World Market, we likely would have like these guys a lot more.

Lowes also came up a bit short with its selection of bronze hardware. The clear versions were alright, but we didn’t spy any bronze alternatives to compare them to. On to the next.

Our Final Trip:  The Home Depot

Oh Martha, why did we foresake you? Why didn’t we just come to you first? With Amy’s love of all things Martha it was immediately apparent that this would be our last stop as soon as we realized that Miss Martha does in fact design hardware too. Of course she does. And Amy l-o-v-e-s it. Of course she does.

It took about 30 seconds to spot our new, bronze, vintage-inspired drawer pulls and matching knobs. Lucite who?

Each pull was only $4.97 and the knobs were $3.97 each – putting us way under a World Market budget.

Then came the big d’oh!

Wait for it.

The drawer pull that we so perfectly measured at a three inch standard width was only three inches on two of our drawers! The bottom, bulkier drawers had pulls that were about 3.5″ apart.

Not the end of the world but it did mean we had to haul our little fannies down to the basement for some wood filler and the drill. We patched and painted the old holes and then drilled new ones for the new, standard sized pulls. Took about 15 minutes.

In the end we decided to leave the pulls off of the bottom of our bottom drawers. Make sense? Our bottom drawers are double fronts and look like they are two drawers when in fact they are only one. In its past life our desk had two drawer pulls on each of these – one being for purely decorative purposes. In the end we decided to forego this bottom handle making us rebels – and about ten bucks richer.

A little bright. A lot of fun. We’re digging it in a big way. It’s kind of giving us the bug to make everything else in this room look just as good, like yesterday. Well, the new desk and last night’s episode of Design Star. Crazy Cathy you’re killin’ us!

P.S. The same clear drawer handles we found at Lowes, were almost HALF the price at Home Depot. Just sayin’

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