Secretary – Two Times a Charm!

We successfully sold our refurbished secretary a little after Christmas, but ran into an unusual problem – two people who really really wanted it! So, we sold it to the first lady who had asked about it, and offered to redo a similar piece for the second lady. After some craigslist searching, she actually found this piece in Durham, which we promptly picked up:

And if you remember the previous secretary, you can see they’re a pretty close match!

The guy that sold us the second secretary is a thrift store owner that has a 20,000 sq ft. warehouse literally FILLED with furniture. He’s a nice guy with tons of beautiful stuff (some of which is in “too good” condition for us to buy, fix up, resell, and make a profit). He invited us to go to the warehouse a couple weekends after purchasing the secretary to check it out, and that building was so overwhelming! We did buy one other piece from him on that trip…but that will be for another post!

So back to the secretary…our buyer loves the style we redid the other one in, so we’re pretty much trying to replicate it. So far, we sanded and stained the wood surfaces and drawers, and we got a coat of primer over the body.

    

There is one issue with the bottom drawer – you can see in the corner its missing a chunk of wood. We’ve brainstormed ways to fix this, and after spending a lengthy amount of time at Home Depot, I came up with these possibilities:

  

I found these little pieces of trim/scrap wood, and we can use our multi tool to carve the little triangle shape we need, an then sand it by hand to match the shape of the drawer with sand paper. I also found one other shaped trim that I didn’t take a picture of…but you get the idea. We’ll see which one works best. Its not going to be perfect, but the drawer that needs fixing is the one that has the darkest stain on it so we’re confident it will not be too noticeable.

This weekend we’ll be painting and sealing the body, drilling a small hole in the back for cords, spray painting the hardware black, figuring out that drawer situation, and hopefully wrapping this project up so our very excited buyer can pick it up!

On another note, we were hoping to finish this secretary up earlier, but I lost some time by taking an amazing trip out to Denver to visit some friends who live out there, and I can’t resist putting a few awesome pictures here! We spent some time hiking in the foothills north of Boulder overlooking the Flat Irons, then had a few great days of skiing at Winter Park Resort. Being in grad school, I forgot how great vacations are!

 

 

 

Weathered Gray Dining Table

Nik dragged this solid pine table out of the furniture dumpster months ago, and we finally wrapped it up on Monday. It started out like this:

And we stained it with Minwax weathered gray stain and sealed it up:

The legs and table skirt were painted off white:

And we put it all together. One of the legs was missing the attachment bolt, so we figured out how to use some L brackets to attach that leg firmly. Here’s how it turned out:

 

 

Entryway Chest

While Nik was home for the holidays, he worked on a chest from his parent’s entryway. Here are some before pictures:                        

He sanded and stained the wood cherry, and the paint was called something like Nocturnal Green. He sealed it with oil-modified water based minwax polyurethane (similar to regular water-based poly, but this is what the Lowe’s by him had). Here’s the finished product:     Now that we’re back from the holidays, we’ve got lots of projects to catch up on, and a new custom project that we’re hopefully picking up tonight in Durham. We just need some warmer weather to come our way so we can work outside and make some progress!