Vintage Trash to Treasure Desk and Chair Makeover

This was the first piece of vintage furniture I (Vicki) purchased in 1976 after moving to a very small town to start my very first professional job. I used the desk and chair for years until the chair literally fell apart and I relegated both pieces to the garage hoping to refinish it one day.

That day finally arrived, lets get started!

There is a full list of everything I used on the website post. Some supplies worked better than others. Click here to see the entire list. It's at the end of the post.

You can see the entire makeover in this video.

Full details can be found on our website here!

Because this had been in the garage so long, the first thing I had to do was clean. Both pieces had dust, spiderwebs, and mold. I also had to hunt down all the parts from the broken chair. I did eventually find all of them!

Because I wanted to restain the piece, I was intent on stripping all the old finish. Some of the techniques I used were a heat gun to remove old wallpaper stuck inside the drawers, a power sander, scrapers including tiny little scraping tools to get in all the crevices, and chemical paint remover.

Once I had removed almost all of the finish, it was apparent the chair was not going to be able to be stained. The stripped wood was a mess and it didn't help that I accidentally knocked it off my work table onto the hard concrete ground. No amount of stain was going to cover that!

Even though the finish did not strip completely off the desk, I did decide to try staining it.

I used Rust-Oleum wood stain in Cognac on the desk, and Rust-Oleum 2X Satin in Vintage Teal on the chair and trim on the desk.

The desk drawer pulls were polished with Quick Glo.

The seat of the chair had to be taken apart to be reglued. While that was drying, I removed the old chair seat upholstery and prepared the new cover. I had a vintage piece of embroidery that I decided to use to upholster the seat. I loved the vibrant colors and very seventies look. The piece was not wide enough so I sewed panels of vintage linen onto each side. I simply stapled it into place and then screwed it back into place on the chair.

Just for fun, I added did some paint pouring in the drawers and once it was dry, added a layer of epoxy.

The last step was to add the letter holder to the back of the desk. We added a couple of coats of lacquer with an HVLP paint sprayer and then put the drawer pulls back into place.

Now it is ready for many more years of use!

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