The Secretariat

Three years ago I began my obsession with secretary desks. 

So much so that I wanted my dad to build me this one: 

Well, that my friends, never came about (probably because he thought I was too smart for a desk crazy). So my next most viable option was to put Nana on the hunt to find me one that we could redo. So she did. I don't have a before picture but this is what it looked like while I used it in college:

(this is taken in the new house)

I had a weird black/silver/white theme going on and now I hate silver and black. Too much of a good thing? Who knows. Anyways, neither of us wanted the silver anymore and neither of us ever really like it as a desk. It's too small and the open part just doesn't feel strong enough to hold both a computer and my elbows. 

So we saw this on Pinterest and loved the idea of 

recreating our secretary into something similar

So with the help of Amanda (bridesmaid/BFF) we started to transform the secretary into something more neutral but with a little pop. We chose Valspar's Tawny for the base color and Valspar's Mustard Yellow for the accent stripe color (both in eggshell). Now we didn't use Valspar paint, instead we chose an inexpensive ($8) Olympic quart size off the shelf and had them match the chips. I don't know if that's what we're supposed to do or what most people do, but that's what our budget tells us to do right now. We also found great draw pulls from Lowe's for around $3 a piece. So we sanded the sucker down and gave it a rub down with some Mineral Spirits to clean it up (it had been spray painted silver so there was a lot of excess if you ran your hand over it, even after sanding). 

We chose these foam brushes for two reasons: I hate brush strokes and bristles and they were only .98 cents. More on them at then end of the post. 

Here it is with one coat of the Tawny.

We ended up having to do three plus coats and additional touchups as we moved it and added stripes. I would recommend primer and more sanding. 

Here are the tools (minus painter's tape) that we used to measure and draw our stripes. I didn't have a certain size of stripe in mind so I just went with the 1 1/2 inch width of our painter's tape to make life easier. It also helped that my level was 1 1/2 inch wide as well. So I started by measuring 1 1/2 inches across the top and sides, marking them with pencil to help me guide my level later. Then with the back edge of the level lined up to the back edge of the secretary I drew a line all the way down moving my level as I went. 

To where it looked something like this on the sides. 

Then Amanda came by and taped off my pencil marks skipping one row where the stripe would be.

Here it is with the sides and top taped off. 

Here it is with one coat of the Mustard Yellow. 

I let the secretary dry over night and removed the tape the next morning. A little bit of the base color came off from the tape because we probably started the striping process about a day early. My patience in letting paint dry is close to non-existent. So here is a picture with paint chips that haven't been touched up yet. Also how about them handles...some more ORB in my life? Okay. 

I will update with a final, final picture of the secretary once I figure out how we are going to style it into a mini bar when we mostly have gin, airplane size bottles of liquor and dollar store wine glasses. But first, my thoughts on those brushes. You've heard it before, but I'll say it again: you get what you pay for. We actually got three brushes (2 medium size and 1 small size). One medium was used for the base on the main part of the secretary and one medium was used for the drawers and the small was used for the stripes. The main base brush did ok - it kept a lot of paint and wasn't easy to wash out by about the third rinse, but it stayed pretty smooth and left little to no brush strokes. The brush we used on the drawers started to tear away at the edge because we were using it to get into the grooves of the bamboo instead of on large flat surfaces. By the middle of the second coat I was getting black foam crumbs on the face of the drawer which I had to sand down slightly in order to do the third coat. The small brush did just fine, but granted it was only used twice and was washed out zero times. I ended up tossing all the brushes at the end of this project so I would probably invest in higher quality brushes next time in order to keep them for more then one project.