«Desk, the original.»

The story of the desk…

My wife makes me watch those home improvement shows. Okay… so she used to “make” me watch them… now I don’t mind as much… call me what you will… but some of these shows aren’t half bad. I think for the most part all I’m doing is watching to get ideas for the house that I will someday™ get to own. (That and Genevieve Gorder is hot) Anyway… one day she was watching I think “While you were out”. This was one where they redid a state house office. Not shown on the website was a desk that they built… it was attached to the wall and painted in brown colors :) … that was the source of inspiration for desk. Somehow I felt that it would be a good desk… however it was weeks after I saw the show that I actually drew what I wanted it to look like. I then took the plans over to my brother's house to talk to him about it.

Couple of week later my brother and I go to home dept (The arm pit of home improvement) and we go to pick out some wood for the project. **Okay I have to inject something here… Home Depot sucks ass… there I’ve said it. However on the side of town that I currently live on, it’s the only place to go for home improvement. In order to ensure that they corner the market, they bought a ton of property around them every time it came up to ensure that Lowe’s wouldn’t build anywhere near them. Home Depot even managed to build a new building… so now they have twice the store and 4 times as much rudeness to go with it. You see, they know they are the only game in town on that side of town, so I guess they figure “why try”… so they come off as being assholes.** However they didn’t have exactly what I was looking for. Faced with the thought of wasting the day driving to the other side of town to look at Lowe’s and hope that they had what I wanted… we turned around and got what we could from Home Depot and decided to sand down the crappy wood that they had.

We spent the rest of the day prepping the wood and cutting the angles for the two legs of the desk. Then we had to wait till the next week to work on the desk again. Let me tell you… I was pooped after the first day sanding and sanding and sanding some more. Thank God my brother got a belt sander… that saved me even more hours than I took to do the work.

The next week we began to work on the legs again. This time we focused on cutting out about an inch of the wood for the shelf to fit into. We then we put the main shelf in and figured out where the other two shelves went. Then we fitted metal brackets that ran across the length of the shelf to add more horizontal support. This meant that we had to carve out a groove for it. Well, we didn’t know how to do it… the rotary saw was a bit much… (kinda like bazooka for a fly swatter) so I looked around and found that my brother got a dremmel from guy who had died and had all these old tools. It was probably one of the first dremmels out there. It probably hadn’t been turned on in 25 years. So I plugged it in and it lurched in my hand and was kinda like holding on to a turbine engine… my brother and I used this ancient tool to carve out the notches… it wasn’t perfect… but it worked… We then drilled out holes in the metal so that we could mount the brackets. Put in the main bottom shelf and screwed it in. Repeated the process for the second shelf and then the top one didn’t need the notches. We just cut out the notch in the wood for the top self… then we put on all the molding… sanding each one before we put it on. This desk was smooth as a baby’s butt… there was a ton of saw dust everywhere from all of the sanding I was doing.

The rest had to wait for the next day. The next day we took the assembled desk to my Mom’s house and I got some stain and began to paint it. The blue was fine. The green however was more of a turquoise color and I didn’t like it. More to the point… my wife didn’t like it. So I gave up and waited till Monday.

Monday I left work early due to allergies kicking my ass. (What is with this season this year… I can’t breathe....). I ended up at my Mom’s house… staring at the desk… the legs had to go… so I borrowed the belt sander and got some sand paper and went to town. It wasn’t going well… I did too good of a job with my stain… so it wasn’t coming of… I still didn’t know what to do with them even after I got done. My mother suggested that I get some paint. That way it didn’t have to be perfect on the removal of the old stuff… So back to Home Shithole.

Home Shithole was not fun… We found the color of paint that my wife would approve of (Caterpillar) and took a number to wait for the paint to be created. Ten minutes later a guy takes the order… walks over to the computer… and punches 3 buttons and the machine injects the proper amounts of color. He then puts it in the mixer and …. Get this… goes on break… YEP! The other two ladies that are there are not really paying attention to what the man had done before he left. They start calling other numbers.. After 5 minutes… my mom and I tried to get their attention… neither one of them would acknowledge that we were there. Finally one of the ladies says “Can I help you?” No, I just wanted your attention to show off the pretty white shirt I was wearing today! We finally pointed her at the mixer and she finally gets the paint out. After a self checkout we finally went back home to my parent's place.

Concentrated on the blue color and put on a clear coat. Then we lightly sanded that and put a second coat on it. Smooth once again. Then came the killer green color. 4 coats to make it cover the old stain and natural wood color. Time to go home…

Tonight I get to take out the old desk put in the new one… which means I get to unhook and rehook all of my computer crap… joy… at least it has a smaller footprint than the current desk and I designed it. That makes 2 things in my house that I’ve designed and helped my brother build. The entertainment center was the first one… I mean where would I find a pre-made thing that would house all my stuff?

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