Wednesday, July 6, 2016

A Vintage Desk in Shades of Blue

Things do not always work out the way you want with furniture. This vintage c,1965 cherry desk by the Flanders Furniture Company had nice pulls to begin with, and the dealer I bought it from told me that though a few were missing, the missing pieces were in the drawers. And most of them were, all but one handle for one pull. Crap.

       The desk needed ten pulls, and there was no natural way to rotate the pulls to accommodate for the one lost pull. So I worked with a vintage set I had ordered from ebay on a whim and some new nickel pulls, and you know what, I love the result hard. It's much fresher feeling than the old pulls, and the nickel plays off the shades of blue so well. The darker color is a new custom color which I've named 'Storm Front'. The paler shade is Albescent, the color of my house, and my new downstairs bathroom, obviously I'm a fan.

       I sanded the top to rid it of the ugly opaque surface and reveal the fabulous and flawless wood grain. I filled the old hardware holes, painted the case, hand painted the secondary color with a detail brush to get nice neat lines, distressed the entire thing, and finished it with my own homemade dark wax.
       You'll have to forgive the photo quality. At the end of last week a teensy piece of my memory card chipped off inside my camera's slot. Though I was able to eventually tease the shard out with a flattened bobby pin, I'm waiting for a new memory card to come in the mail, so it's cell quality photos until tomorrow at the earliest!

        On a weird but related note, though I didn't find the missing pull inside the drawers I did find a very wealthy woman's entire financial history inside the large bottom drawer. All her bank statements, all her fancy schmancy investment papers, and both her and her husband's wills. She was admirably well organized and probably would have been wicked pissed that whomever inherited her fine desk didn't bother to clean out the drawers before selling it. But don't worry Ms. Beauchamp of Springfield, I destroyed all the paperwork, except the receipt list, which I'm keeping.








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