The essence of survival is remaining undaunted in the face of adversity. As the saying goes “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, or chicken piccata, if you prefer (and I do). Sometimes a little bit of good luck can balance out the bad luck and help make that adversity much less daunting.
Such was the case with this miracle find. Two days after getting laid off, my beautiful partner and I were stepping out the back door of our apartment building (en route to the gym, I’m disappointed to admit) when we discovered this treasure discarded next the dumpster behind the building next door.
At first I could hardly believe my eyes and we stood by momentarily to see if this was, perhaps, a mistake or simply a temporary resting point for someone in the middle of moving the desk. But, no owner made his or herself known while we debated and ultimately we agreed that it must have been abandoned.
Now, my personal opinion is that the abandonment of a desk this gorgeous is tantamount to the abandonment of a newborn baby. I still cannot conceive of a scenario where dumping this desk in an alley way is appropriate, under any circumstance.
Granted, it was beat up. The top had scratches, gouges, missing bits of veneer and water stains. It wobbled like a freshman lightweight at a frat party; and it was filled with coins and broken pencils and other bits of office detritus. Oh, and it WEIGHED A TON.
Probably not an entire, honest-to-goodness ton, but it was certainly the heaviest piece of furniture I have moved in a long, long time. Upon looking inside the pencil drawer, we also discovered, much to my amusement, the wood-burnt stamp “Made by Hooker”.
Prior to discovering this desk, I had never heard of Hooker Furniture, but a quick online search taught me that we had discovered a piece of furniture that was easily the nicest piece of furniture either of us had ever owned. That realization, coupled with the need for something to occupy my time while job searching, made the decision to tackle a seemingly boring refinish job a little easier to swallow.
My first order of business was trying to figure out how to refinish the desk by myself. Because it weighs so much, I knew I would never be able to move it in and out of the apartment to strip and sand it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the entire desk was held together by naught but readily-accessible screws and nails. No hidden dowels or nails or glue, for that matter. Just screws and nails.
Because of this fantastic bit of bold craftsmanship, I was able to break the desk down into manageable pieces. Once disassembled, I set about assessing each individual piece to see what I could do to rectify that drunken swagger the desk had acquired over years of use. I started by re-gluing the tenon and mortise joints on the shorter set of legs.
Stripping this desk turned out to be a pretty simple process, with none of the stripping woes I’ve encountered in some of my other endeavors. Once I got everything down to the original veneer, I took a break to let everything dry overnight and turned my attention to the drawer pulls.
Borrowing from a trick that I learned with the leg caps of the Lamination Lamentation, I soaked the hardware in a mild solution of Bar Keeper’s Friend. It only took a little bit of elbow grease to clean them up wonderfully (before and after picture above).
Since I had the luxury of working with all the individual pieces, I decided to stain and clear coat everything separately. This enabled me to be more flexible with my time and allowed me to continue to move pieces around easily, rather than trying to move around the entire desk.
After I had the short legs and the frame stripped, sanded, stained and clear-coated, I reattached the short legs to the bottom of the cabinet. While the desk was originally constructed using only those screws and nails, I decided I could make it sturdier, and make that sturdiness last longer, if I reinforced everything with glue as I reassembled the desk. To that end, I glued the short legs to the bottom of the cabinet, in addition to the screws.
After the glue dried, I flipped it upright and reinforced the desk top with some glue all the way around the skirt, before screwing it back in place. Once the glue was dry, the desk was solid as a rock; like a teetotaler on Sunday morning.
I didn’t want to overwhelm the desk with a glossy finish, so I went with a satin finish, wipe-on polyurethane. When the desk was completely reassembled, I went over the whole thing once more with another coat to make sure it was even throughout.
It’s sort of difficult to tell from the pictures, because the lighting is different, but the finished product is so much richer looking than the original. This is in part due to it simply having been refinished, but also in part due to the removal of the bizarrely ubiquitous tinted finish you find on mid century furniture. By removing that and letting the original wood tone show through more naturally, it brightened up the desk and really showcases the beauty of the walnut veneer. Sure, now you can see the oak and know that it’s not all the same wood, but I kind of like that effect. It’s more honest.
