Who would have thought that an old discarded desk could steer someone’s life’s direction in a totally new unknown territory. When in 2006 we moved to our own house, the previous owners had left their old desk behind, not because they were feeling generous or anything, but the particle board desk was broken and not in usable condition.
This same desk got me into this whole new world of DIYing, starting from upcycling furniture and then moving onto building furniture and then home improvements and much more after that.
After moving into our home, first thing I painted was our daughters’ rooms in purple. Our older daughter had wanted a purple room for the longest time and the younger one (six at that time) was okay with whatever color. Let me tell you that I had never picked up a paint brush (or a roller) before that. In the name of power tools I had only an 18V drill/driver, which was hardly ever used. I even tried my hand at painting some flowers on the walls of my older daughter’s room with craft paints from Walmart.
These are my daughters’ rooms with that purple paint and wallpaper borders.
I had to dig really deep into my picture albums to find these ones. I hardly have any pictures of the projects done in my initial days of DIY journey. Each of these rooms got another makeover after this. But That transformation saga is the story for some other day.
Now back to the desk, because this post is about the desk that steered my life in a totally new awesome direction, unknown to me until then. After finishing painting the rooms, I was left with some purple latex paint and some of the craft paints from painting flowers in one of the rooms. In the meantime I had also discovered a whole new world of mis-tint paints, and had some of those too.
One day my husband asked me to give him a hand to take ‘that’ desk out on the curb to make room for a new one. I don’t know why but something inside told me to fix that desk and I told him so. He was kind of skeptical about that, but did not argue much. The desk was broken at 2 places and was missing the handle on the door. I glued the broken pieces back together and got a new handle from Homedepot. That handle did not fit into the existing holes. I had no idea that I could fill those holes with some wood putty or some other such material and drill new holes to match the holes to the ones in the handle. Rather I took it back and exchanged it with another one with the right size holes. Pictures below show the transformation of the desk.
I was like a kid in the candy store, who wants to have each and every type of candy there. As you can see, I painted with don’t even know how many colors. That’s what I did back then, just went crazy with paint.
That was it. Seeing something headed to the landfill getting a new leash of life was so satisfying that I got hooked onto this new hobby of mine, fixing and painting furniture. After that there was no looking back for me.
Youtube was in it’s infancy state back then. It was not that you could get almost any type of video on that platform. Even if it did, I had no clue about that. I learned mostly by reading a lot of books from my local library or diving head first into a project and learning on the job by making my fair share of mistakes. Once I even tried to clean the alkyd paint with water. Just imagine the kind of mess I might have gotten myself into.
In the beginning I was mostly into upcyling furniture, lamps or painting faux finishes on the walls of our home. I don’t know how or when I gradually got into building furniture, and doing most of the home maintenance and home improvement stuff. That may be the obvious step I suppose.
I am very proud to say that most of the furniture in our house is either built or made over by me, and most home improvements are also done by me. Of course, I have come a long way since doing this crazy colorful desk. My style is way more subtle and subdued now. Along with posting my current projects, I will try to post some from the past, if I could find pictures. That will show you the evolution of my work.
If you are reading this post, I assume either you are a DIYer or enjoy reading about this kind of stuff. I’d like to know if you are a DIYer, and how you got into this amazing world of DIYing?
Leave a Reply