The Secretary Desk - Part 2

My friend Jo said she was curious about what the secretary desk looked like before I refinished it. This is the only detailed picture I took before I stripped the desk itself.
I started with the drawers and stripped and sanded those first, you can see the bottom drawer here for comparison.

The cubby holes were a bit more work to sand, but they are so handy for my monthly bills. The actual fold down desk part was no longer part of the desk when I got it, but I actually like it open like this.

 This picture was taken after it was all stripped and I was still in the sanding stage. I managed to get it all done in one summer, the weather was more co-operative back then.

It was kind of awkward to have to lug that in and out the back door when I worked on it on the back deck. I got a work out that summer!

The Secretary Desk - Part 1

 I got this desk from my friend Steve Stimson when he used to have his antique shop downtown called The Lone Wolf. It was my sixth refinishing project that took me the whole summer of 2007 to complete.
It was kind of bittersweet to strip it, because it had a really cool gold stencil on the drawers and the lower frame. But the paint was really in bad shape in a lot of spots and somewhere along the way someone had spilled some white paint on the side. So I decided to tackle it.
It turned out to be made of beautiful Tiger Maple, and I used a simple finish to let the grain of the wood stand out. It was worth all the work.
I put new casters on it, and it rolls around much easier (and quieter) than before. The cool thing about refinishing a piece like this, is that it is not going to be perfect when you're done, because it has it's own unique character.

 I had never noticed when it was painted black that the drawer pulls were not evenly placed on the drawers. And not only that, but not all of the pulls matched; one was clearly homemade. It originally had those half-dome style pulls, but I had to go with the round so that it didn't look totally weird when I was done.
The other desk I got from Steve, is an old Army desk (possibly from Fort Ebey on Whidbey Island) and is something I hope to finish this summer. I started on it in the summer of 2009 I think, and got the drawers and the top all stripped and refinished. But circumstances have prevented me from finishing all of the base, and I really want to get that back together.
I don't have any pictures of that project yet, so that will be for another post, at another time...