Weekend Desk Stain Project

I mentioned a while back that I was seeking out an asian desk for my computer/guest room. I gave up on that when the sticker shock for those things hit me. Instead, I picked out a desk system by Furniture in the Raw. They had all the pieces of an Archbold 800 series modular desk set in stock I wanted. The furniture is built out of solid pine and while more sturdy than any Wal-Mart special I've put together, it's also much lighter.

1. #824 - Keyboard Pull / 3 Drawer desk
   
2. #831 - CPU / Scanner Pull
   
3. #861 - Corner / Keyboard Pull

A few hundred dollars and trips to Home Depot later and you have what I did with my girlfriend all weekend.

It has been quite some time since I worked with wood. I'm thinking back to some high school classes and those lessons stuck with me so well that I forgot to sand with the grain for the first few seconds until Christa reminded me.

The room in which it'll reside has a dark walnut wood laminate floor, the ceiling and walls are dark red, and the window has bamboo shades installed.

I knew ahead of time the Red Room would be hard to color match. Choosing a stain held me back several days and I didn't in fact pick one until Sunday morning. The final choice was Minwax Puritan Pine 218. One of my purchases was a Ryobi D40K corded drill and a 5" adhesive disk sanding attachment. Unfortunately, Home Depot only carried 120 grit sandpaper for that form factor (and it wasn't at the damn store!) and the best the nearest Lowe's could muster was 150 grit.

As a result of that and my inexperience with using rotary sanding tools, you can clearly see fine sanding arcs in the surface when you move up close. I don't mind them enough to grab 220 grit or something more fine to sand them out, however. I'm using my father's "it builds character" card on this one, buddy.

We only used one coat and actively wiped the area down with rags to keep the tone on the lighter side. I'm still getting the hang of my digital camera, so I apologize for the image inconsistency among the top three and the last picture above. The above most closely resembles the finished result.

Next up: slapping on a few coats of clear gloss.

Posted by Drizzten at September 19, 2005 09:48 AM