Dave Viner's Weblog

Fun house projects

I've been refinishing my desk over the past few weeks. It's not a full desk, just a desktop and 2 shelves, all made out of wood. The wood is in decent condition, but it's just scratchy enough to be really annoying. Also, the wood is stained lighter than our crown moulding, so Diana wanted me to restain them. hence the whole project.

Last week I took down the shelves, sanded them, restained them, and revarnished them. I really like that kind home project - enough work to make it more than a one day affair but less than 1 week, and fairly simple to accomplish. It took longer than I thought, as usual, but I just had fun messing with the wood.

With the shelves complete and reinstalled, I attacked the desktop today. After heavily sanding the desktop with 120 sandpaper, I flipped over the top to give the underside a sanding and discovered a new problem. The previous owner had installed and later removed a drawer underneath the desktop. However, the guides for the drawer were screwed into 2 small slabs of plywood (maybe 1 inch by 1.5 feet and 1/4 of an inch high) which were glued to the underside of the desktop and those glued slabs were still there. So this presented something of a challenge.

My first attempt was to use a putty knife to remove the old glued-on slabs. I chipped away some of the slabs, but overall it didn't work too well. Then I remembered... I own a Dremel. Messing with power tools on a Tuesday afternoon is AWESOME. I grabbed the Dremel, attached a drum sander head, and went to town. In about 10 minutes, the slabs were ground into sawdust covering me, my porch, and the tool. The only problem was that I couldn't figure out how to use the Dremel to sand the areas smooth. If you know, let me know. Tomorrow, I plan to fill in the gauged wood with some wood putty, and sand the top again with 220 sandpaper.

Anyways, for me, a day when I get to use my Dremel is a pretty good day, by any standard.