One Room Challenge: Week 5 | Restoring an Antique Typewriter Desk Part 2

I've never been more excited about restoring an old piece of furniture! But to be fair, this is my first time really doing it. If you missed last weeks One Room Challenge, we're taking my old desk that had been painted white and restoring it to it's original wood and hardware. I didn't plan for this guy to take up 2 weeks of posting, but it was a beast! 

Week 1: The Befores
Week 2: The Mood Board(s)
Week 3: Salvaging A Fox Hunt Print
Week 4: Restoring an Antique Typewriter Desk Part 1

Here is a quick reminder of the desk pre-restoration: white paint, nickle hardware, and full of paint stains from my painting days.

Picking up where we left off last post where I stripped all the paint off. The next step was to sand down the entire thing, getting all those leftover bits and corners. Why is there a hole in the middle of the desk you ask? That piece used to be the old swivel top that carried the typewriter, I took it off to better reach the inside and then put it back into place.

As you can see, after sanding most of the color was gone and it was ready for the next step;

Sometimes you can get away without conditioning the wood before staining, but this time I wasn't going to chance it with such a big piece. I grabbed a can of Minwax's Pre-Stain Conditioner and got to work on covering the entire desk. It goes on dark just like wood when it gets wet, so don't be afraid that it looks like stain at first.

After letting it dry, it returned to its light color and was ready to be stained.

A big thank you to all of you who helped me pick the stain color on my Instastories! After alot of debating I ended up with one of my favorite's Early American.

And there she is! Perfectly imperfect. I'm so glad I decided to restore the desk we already had instead of buying a brand new one. There's dings, and scratches, and holes but all those things just give it so much character. The original pulls are incredible, I just sanded them down and stained them like the desk. They're wide and bring back the 50's office vibe. Look at this picture I found, so similar!

You can't get out of here without a good side by side. I think things went well for my first desk rescue and I can't wait to see how it works in the final room. Next on the list is to clean out the rest of the room and get ready for decorating for the reveal!

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