Desk Building Progress

As promised, we’re here with a little desk building update.  Emphasis on little.  Typical Angie reporting live here with her usual complete under-estimation of the amount of time that it would take to build a desk.  I was thinking it would be a weekend project.  Mmmmmm….no.  We did manage to finish the desk top in one weekend (as gushed blogged about back here).  Next project to tackle on the desk building list….frame the cabinets.  Let’s revisit our little desk plan:

Sweet technical drawing skills.  With the desk top checked off the list, we focused on building the cabinets/bases this past weekend.  We needed to build three cabinets: two 15″ x 22-1/2″ and one 24″ x 22-1/2″.  If you could put your x-ray goggles on, because so many of you have them, you would see that inside each of these cabinets are two pull out drawers.  The large cabinet will have one pull out for the printer and one pull out for paper/supplies.  Colby’s end cabinet (the one of the left) will have one pull out drawer for office supplies and one hanging file drawer and my end cabinet (the one on the right) will have two basic pull out drawers for office supply stuff (more likely to be craft supplies…you know…since I finally graduated from UMaine with my MBA).  So this past weekend, we built ourselves three of these:

That’s one of the side cabinet frames.  Colby pieced these together using a very simple design made out of pine.  Kregg, as in jig, may have made an appearance in this portion of the project as well.  And oh look….here are two more of these bad boys:

That picture was taken exactly how the cabinets will face (thus, we’re looking at the fronts of the cabinets where the drawers will go).  We went for a really simple design (since neither of us can claim “cabinet maker” on our resumes).  The drawers will essentially be boxes that will attach to those pieces of pine running from the front to the back.  So one side of the slide rails will attach to the drawer and the other will attach to the frame.  Colby has been in the process of building the drawers at a slow and steady pace (it’s his first drawer attempt so he’s learning as he goes).  Just one drawer per night…that’s his goal.  In the meantime, I took full advantage of having the cabinet frames done and started painting them.

I’m learning that it’s so much easier to paint furniture as you build it.  Lesson learned after the great media cabinet build where I literally had to contortionist myself  to get inside the cabinet to paint it.  My shoulder still hasn’t let me forget about that one!  I plopped on two coats of primer and only one coat of my usual Valspar Betsy’s Linen.  I still want to put one final coat of paint on the whole thing after it’s all pieced together to help create that seamless finish.  Painting before the cabinet was completely built also meant that I would have a coat of paint under where the slide rails attach to the cabinet.  I can’t imagine trying to paint around those!

You can see some of the Kregg Jig holes in the pic above.  I cannot reiterate enough that it is soooooo much easier to paint the cabinet innards now!  So that’s the update…as little and pathetic as it sounds.  We built some cabinet frames and painted them.  But hey….it’s one more step closer to a dream desk like our inspiration picture from Young House Love.

I die….seriously….I die (that’s me channeling Sherry from Young House Love…she’s so amazing…oh…and her hubby too).

Pssst….Oh holy crap calf strains PAINFUL!  Anybody else have any tips for alleviating that kind of pain?!  I’m totally writing this post bunkered down on the couch after pulling my calf muscle at tennis practice this evening.  Seriously…doesn’t my calf muscle realize I have multiple painting projects to attend to….seriously….stupid calf!