My step-dad is a junker and has some really cool furniture finds over the years. He gets stuff free off the road or from Craig’s List and then spent a little bit of time repairing to bring it back to life. In fact, one of the first memories of him dating my mom is when he took all the wobbly kitchen chairs from her second hand set and re-glued them together. I thought that was cool. He knows how to fix and make just about anything which is handy in my pursuit of hidden treasures.
He picked up two little school desks one day and thought I would like them. Sure! Why not! They were a little bit yucky; some rust, lots of dirt and a few pieces of chewed up bubble gum on the bottom of the seats. The nasty gum proves they are legit school desks, right? The desks sat around in my garage all summer long. They were ugly and institutional looking. I couldn’t find motivation until the weather turned cold and I wanted to park my car in the garage. Something about scraping ice off my windows really cranked up my inspiration for the desks! We had a freakishly warm weekend in November, so I used the nice weather for some deep cleaning before spray painting the metal parts of the desks. When the spray paint dried, I found a dark messy corner of the basement to hide them and secretly worked on painting the wood portions white and adding some flair with my vinyl cutter machine.
On Christmas Eve, we set up the two desks in front of the Christmas tree to catch the girl’s attention as soon as they came down the next morning. I made each girl a couple of blank “books” by sewing a straight line through five sheets of paper. The top sheet is pretty scrapbooking paper and the inside sheets are just copy paper. The books are so simple, but look so fancy! They took about 15 seconds to sew and cost maybe 3 cents. Now THAT’s my kind of project!
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