Brass Snacks - Bite Size Restoration Stories

A wonderful vendor of Makers Market Sun Prairie and friend of the store reached out to us about refinishing her great grandfathers desk for her son to use. The desk had been sitting in her cousins basement for years and it needed a bit of attention.

When the desk was dropped off, we were in full on COVID 19 mode and she filled us in a little bit more on the history behind the piece via text message.

Did you catch that little nugget of information about the desk? Her great grandfather had used the inside of the middle drawer to track birthdays!! I mean..............come on! This is the stuff our dreams are literally made of! In the world of furniture refinishing there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, better than this. To be trusted to refinish a piece of furniture that has such sentimental value and history..........it filled our hearts with pure joy.

The original plan was to strip this bad boy down and give him a raw wash finish that would highlight all his original wood grain. From the pictures sent we thought we wouldn't have a problem coming up with something close to below.

But, then we started sanding and it became very clear that a combination of soft light wood, damaged veneer, and red dye stain was not going to allow us to get down to that raw wood look. We were disappointed and dreading having to give our VIP customer the bad news. We broke it to her as gently as possible with a new plan in place. The shell of the desk was going to have to be painted, the original veneer was just too damaged, but we were good to keep the drawers and top all wood. They would need to be stained a darker color because of the red, but they could be wood.

She agreed and put her full faith and trust in us to make this piece shine again.