Baby Steps

We got a lot done on the desk for the butler's pantry/craft room the weekend after Thanksgiving.

This is by no means the only way to make a desk from a hollow core door but it did the trick for us. The idea for using the door came from the lovely John and Sherry at younghouselove. Only problem for us was our house was built in 1931 so we don't have a stash of hollow core doors laying around anywhere. We thought about making the top out of wood but when the door only costs $20 I said why bother? It's flat, square, has smooth edges already and you can even splurge and get a door with a hole in it for $10 more and use that as a place to drop all your electrical cords. So that's what we did.

We also veered a little bit on the table leg thing since I was going for something that looked a little less modern and a little more like this.

Here is our illustrated step-by-step, excluding any pictures of attaching the top to the base or painting. What can I say? I got lazy with the picture taking.

Here is the door laying next to the frame we built out of 2x4 studs. They were cheap and going to be painted black so there didn't seem to be much sense in buying any fancy wood.

 Studs. You know what they look like.

Table legs. These had screws already installed in the top that we removed. We basically screwed through the frame and into the legs and prayed that once the door was screwed securely to the frame it would help stabilize them. It worked pretty well.

This is the frame sitting on top of the door. We used a chalk line to mark a 1" border all the way around the door so we could do our best to keep the frame square. The door is a 24"x80" hollow core door from Lowes. 

Mr. Blossom attaching the support for the middle of the frame. I don't know if the door really needed the additional support but we had the wood and figured it can't hurt. Ignore the camouflage beanie. I don't know where he got that. Actually, I do and I was with him when he paid good money for it. I couldn't stop him.

Here are the legs and frame painted black. I used Behr Premium Plus Ultra in Pure Black High Gloss. We had some already on hand from painting our exterior doors so we just used that. We did have to purchase a quart of the same paint in the off the shelf white semi-gloss for the top.

More pics of the finished product once the room comes together a little more.