Of the three pieces of teller desk we salvaged, the top of the desk was definitely the  most time consuming. It was also the most rewarding.

Here’s a not-so-great picture of what we started with.

You can see that once upon a time, someone stripped the top, which ultimately saved us a ton of time. However, we still needed to sand, and sand, and sand some more. You can also see what looks like water stains and severe discoloration.

I’m absolutely terrible about getting progress pictures, so we’ll skip to the fun part. The big reveal.

We used Minwax Jacobean stain and three coats of Minwax water-based semi-gloss poly on the tops and sides.

Luckily, we were able to salvage the original hardware. A little elbow grease and polish goes a long ways!

The legs came from our buddy Chad at Chadrock Memorabilia. He salvaged a few tables from an old bar in town. One of the table tops was beyond repair, but the legs were still in pretty good shape.  We were in the middle refinishing the top, and hadn’t given much thought of what we were going to use for legs when we got a call from Chad asking if we were interested in four table legs. NEVER turn down free table legs…even if you don’t have a plan for them yet. Something always comes up.

We gave the legs a quick coat of a matte black spray paint, and WAH-LA! Good as new!

This was a really fun project to work on as a family. Garrett even stepped in and helped his dad stain the desk. He may have splashed  more stain on the drive way and on himself than he did on the desk, but he sure had fun doing it. Life is short, right?