Vintage Writing Desk Makeover

Oh snap, y’all. The very first piece of furniture for the guest bedroom is IN!!!

She’s a cute and slightly sophisticated little thing, but she didn’t start out that way.

And she showed up for a whopping $25 on Craigslist just in time for this month’s Trash to Treasure Transformation Tuesday. (You can see the rest of this month’s thrifty makeovers at the end of this post.)

(Some affiliate links are provided below. Full disclosure here.)

You know those cheesy 90s high school movies where the main storyline is about the nerdy girl with glasses and suddenly there’s a makeover montage ending in the perfect little black dress, the glasses are removed, and voila she’s the supermodel popular girl? (What happened to those?)

This desk reminds me of that.

If you’ve been following along on our planning phase of the guest bedroom, we had the style identity crisis, the furniture layout conundrum, and the mood board brain splatter before finally making things happen in here.

One thing we definitely needed though was a really small desk with just enough room for my mother-in-law since she sometimes works from our house on random days.

It took two coats of Fusion Mineral Paint in Coal Black, a quick makeshift replacement shelf with a 1×6, a new pair of aged brass knobs, and she was a whole new desk.

I found this vintage rattan chair for $17 at Goodwill the other day too.

We got around to painting the walls and gray trim (be still my heart) this week too, and it’s already like a brand new room in here!

And Robert hung up these green velvet curtains that are even better in person than I thought they’d be. Ahhh! So good! I still have to hem them and hang up the others, but I’m a FAN!

This corner is just a little snack of what’s to come. I finally found a secondhand cane headboard last week too, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

You can see the rest of this month’s Trash to Treasure makeovers from my T2T blogger friends here:

Clockwise from top left:

Artsy Chicks Rule | Prodigal Pieces | Girl in the Garage | Confessions of a Serial DIYer

And if you want more furniture makeover ideas you can see them all here along with tips for painting furniture here.

19 Comments

The desk looks great & I love the green velvet curtains. I wouldn’t even hem them, they look great as is!

Love how you transformed this piece! It’s amazing!

Paige
http://thehappyflammily.com

That’s such a beauty now, Lauren!! xo

your new to you desk turned out great. is the fusion paint similar to chalk paint? the desk looks like it has a slight sheen to it, but the pics on amazon link look a bit chalky. do you seal fusion paint with wax or poly? thks.

Lauren says:

August 13, 2019 at 2:34 pm

Thanks, Sonja! It’s a bit different from chalk paint but I actually like it better for a lot of reasons. You can distress it like chalk paint and it doesn’t require any prep work. But what I like about Fusion better is that it is self-leveling so it doesn’t show brush strokes and it doesn’t require a sealer, so in the end it’s less work a slightly cheaper than chalk paint since you don’t have to pay for wax.

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