I love vintage school desks and bought this one about a year ago. I was drawn to its silly little basket. Deluded by TikTok DIYers, I thought it would be a piece of cake to fix up. It was not.
These are the listing images. I was probably also swayed by that beautiful flat file in the picture. At some point the original top had been replaced with these rustic floor boards (?) that were gross, warped, and generally stupid looking, so with the help of my husband and his tools, we made a new tabletop out of plywood.
The paint on the frame was chipped and the saddest of school beiges, so I decided to try stripping it off, which in hindsight, was a really bad move. There are so many crevices in that silly little basket. The paint easily came off of the bottom portion of the legs, but the rest of it was pretty stubborn and I set the whole thing aside for months.
Well I learned that unpainted metal likes to rust, and rust it did. So after scrubbing with WD-40 and sanding off the remaining paint, I was finally able to prime and paint. I picked a color that ended up being more vibrant than I wanted (why are the cap colors so different from the actual paint?), but overall I’m pretty happy with it and the extra surface it’s providing me in my art making space.
