Jumping on the Ombre Bandwagon

I bet if there really were some sort of wagon painted in a lovely ombre that people could jump on, they would.  That's how crazy the general public is about ombre.  People will ombre their cats in various shades of pink.  It's a sickness.

Regardless of these facts, I decided to join the party.  And while I was at it, I thought I'd take part in the ever-so-awesome Pinterest Challenge (put together by Young House Love and Katie Bower).  Let's make it official, shall we?

Consider it official.

I started out seeeveral months ago, with this.

The woman who sold it to me at a garage sale had the gall to haggle with me, telling me it was her Grandfather's desk, and practically a priceless antique.  Sigh.  If it's that near and dear to your heart, lady, don't paint it eight colors, spill wax all over it, slap no less than twelve drawer pulls on it, then drag it onto your front lawn to be sold to the highest bidder!  Take my money, woman!

Here's a nice sampling of a few of the colors this beauty has been over the years.

Poor Grandpa.  If he could only see his beloved desk now.  I'm sure wherever he is, he was happy that I took it that fine Saturday.

Then it sat in my garage for quite the while.  One fine day I finally heave-hoed it out into my driveway and started in on it.

If I was patient and long suffering and a true lover of furniture, I'm sure I would have stripped all the paint off and lovingly refinished it.  That is not what happened.

I did, however, sand down and unearth the piece of hardware on the front rather than painting over it yet again.

 Looky there.  A bit bedraggled, but paint free!

I also took the liberty of removing all of the drawer hardware.  They looked like peanutbutter balls in my estimation.  Maybe I should have left them...  Now I'm hungry.

I filled the massive amounts of holes in the drawers with a little spackle...just squished it in there good with my finger and scraped off the excess with a putty knife.

Once it was dry, I sanded it a tiny bit to smooth it out, then started painting!  Pretty simple, really.  I just used a 3" roller and bright white paint.  Just slapped it right on over the other thirteen coats.  Wasn't perfect, but it did the job.

Then I didn't like it.  Part of it was the over abundance of white, and the other part was it was kinda gloppy in places.  Like where the fold-down desk meets the desk frame.

Also, the hinges were ridiculous.  They could barely move.  Soooo, I scraped and scraped until I finally reached the screws to remove the hinges.  That was a good time.

 

Then, I got myself down to Home Depot and snagged three test pots of paint and had them colored three shades of blue.  I couldn't tell you the names if I had to.  Just picked three off a gradient paint chip.

I put two quick coats on the fronts of the drawers and let them dry over night.  I just sanded down and touched up a couple spots on the front of the desk, and lightly spray painted the hinges.  Then Anthony put it all back together since I'm lazy like that.

Oh, and to spruce up the inside of the desk, I took a piece of cardboard, some cork contact "paper" I happened to have on hand, and a piece of fabric...

I cut the cork to the same size as the cardboard and just stuck it right on.

Then I whipped out my trusty glue gun and wrapped it all up in the fabric.

 

 

There you have it!  Instant spruce!

And here's the final product.  Finally.

Hope we made Grandpa proud.