Update : Desk Reconstruction

So the painting portion of this project was an...educational experience.

Once the tabletops were assembled and glued together, they were terribly messy. The cuts on the sides of the smaller table looked like torn paper more than wood.A quick trip to Home Depot and a pint of wood filler took care of that. I just slapped it on and mashed the filler into the huge gaps between the edge of the table and the veneer.

Once it had cured, however, it looked just as bad. Like a 4 year old was playing with orange playdoh and left it smeared all over the table. Oh well; this is a great excuse to repaint (which I really wasn't planning to do, originally).

Another trip to H to the Dizzo, and I had 3 cans of high gloss red spraypaint. It was fairly easy to spray the tables; just plant them on top of the paint cans left over from the dresser repaintings, and go to town.  The paint was pretty, and exactly the right color of red I love. The surface I was painting on, however, didn't share my love for it, and chipped it off with a stiff breeze or  long hard look. I sanded and prepped the surface, but 5 coats of spraypaint with adequate drying times wasn't enough to overcome the hatred the veneer had for the paint oppressors. There was no way that I could use this a a usable desk and not watch bits of paint fly off constantly.

Fortunately, Jenn had a great idea. While looking in the paint and stain aisle (on our Nth trip to H Dizzle), she suggested trying the Bartop Resin kit that they had.  The resin was something I was thinking of using for the coffee table project (in a much larger scale) and figured this was a great opportunity to try it out. We bought the kit, and appropriate accessories, and headed home.

NOTE: Resin is not easy to use!!

The components must be measured EXACTLY, and mixed with very specific timings, and poured a specific way and, best of all, left to cure for 3 days in a perfectly dust, hair, bug, seed, pollen, (everything, really) free room to cure. ANYTHING that touches the resin while it cures is forever embedded in it.

The first round went alright, considering. We measured, mixed and poured just the right way. The smaller table didn't get poured quite right, so it wasn't level, and needed a second layer. The curing, though, went terribly. Despite trying to make a clean room outside (inside we were worried about cats + fur+ chemical vapors), a massive drift of pollen and bugs hit the resin and stuck fast. The smaller table was hit the worst, for some reason. Once embedded, there is NO way to get it out short of scraping all of the resin off the tabletop and starting from scratch, which frankly I'm not about to do.

On the second pour on the small table, I rushed it. I assumed that;

1.) if both bottle A and bottle B start with identical measurements of liquid,
2.) and the first pour used equal amounts of liquid A and B, then
3.) both bottle A and B must have equal amounts left.

and thus measuring was unnecessary. Nope. as I started the mixing process, I noticed that I had more than 20% more liquid B than A. I assumed that this wasn't as big of an issue as the reverse being true, since Liquid B was a catalyst, accelerating the cure of liquid A. This was not the case. Once cued, I noticed that the smaller table seemed a bit...softer than the large table. Not a lot, but there was a noticible difference in the hardness of the two. The large table is acrylic hard. The smaller one, less so. It's not super apparent, but it does soften if you put something really hot on it, like a bowl of soup.

Oh, well, now I know. and the small table is really only for my Keyboard and mouse, so it's not much of an issue.

Next time, on This Nerd House: assembly!