Clean Slate

I've mentioned it before, but I'm obsessed with blogging. Not really writing my own, but following others. I don't think I have the creative writing skills, nor that exciting of a life to post something about every day. I mostly like to follow DIY blogs, home decorating or crafty blogs. It gives me such great ideas that I can store in my brain as something I'd like to do for my house someday. A lot of the crafty ones I look at from time to time are a little to0 "country" or just make me think "okay, seriously,why would I take all that time to get those supplies and

then make that." But such was not the case when I decided I wanted to make a desk out of a door.

Surprisingly, I don't think my idea even came from a blog, but it could have. I just finally decided that I had had enough of our corner desk. I wanted a custom look, something that was not too big and had plenty of work surface space.

To get some ideas of what others had done and what mine could look like I started looking at blogs and google images. I first found this one on the younghouselove facebook page.

I was like “yes, perfect”. Although, the legs weren’t doing it for me. I wanted mine to be a bit more streamlined like the one younghouselove had actually done for their house (seen here).

After some more looking around I decided that I wanted a door, probably stained, some straight legs and possibly a shelf or two to accommodate the shelves I was losing by not having the corner desk anymore (which had shelves, or levels really).

First step, I knew I could find a cheap door at the Habitat Renovation Station downtown. Just like I thought, I had more than enough to choose from . We ended up picking a 36” by 80” hollow unfinished door. Since at that point I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to stain it or paint it. The large door also gave us the ability to make our own custom size.

We decided to make our a desk 27” by 72”. That also enabled the 9” excess to be our shelves.

In the beginning, I thought making this desk was going to be really easy and take no time at all. I was wrong. It was pretty easy, but it took forever.

First, after we cut the door to size, we had to cut away the cardboard filler, insert some 1x2‘s so we could have something to screw the legs into, fill in the sides with 1x1's, let everything dry, then give everything a good light sanding. We also had to fill in the edges of the shelves. Then we had to stain everything and apply three layers of polyurethane.

In the end, after taking an afternoon to put it together. I am totally in love with my new desk.