Office Progress: It’s A Filing Bonanza

Those filing cabinets that I scored for $5 at a yard sale are improving. Spiffy.

The big plan was to have them fully painted by this point; what you’re seeing up there is straight primer, not white paint, not white-wash, and I don’t actually have intentions of leaving them primed in white, but until I pick out some area rugs to fill out the room, it doesn’t seem right to rush into landing on a paint color, you know? Although if it’s worth anything to anyone, I’m dying to figure out how I can work CB2’s chartreuse into the mix.

Side note: Holy sweet bejesus, that desk from the Holiday 2011 catalogue is only $149.

In any case, my efforts in prepping for color selection have instilled confidence in the original purchase (after one of the cabinets completely fell apart as I carried it to my car after paying the guy, yikes). I started by disassembling the dressers, removing the drawers, and sanding them completely so that the new coats of primer and paint would be adhering to a smooth, clean surface. I also used some wood glue and my BFF, the nail gun, to fix some weak structural points, making them fully in tact and smooth glidin’ again.

Another side note: Cody howl. He’s clearly bothered by the Ryobi sander the same way he’s bothered by the Dyson.

Part of the whole makeover effort involved removing the drawer pulls, locks, and label holders, and patching every hole with wood filler; the smaller screw holes were patched in a pinch, but the larger holes left by the locksets were a bit more challenging to fill because of their size. We considered securing a dowel in place and filling in around it to make it authentically wood again, but filling and sanding it multiple times worked just fine. Thankfully you can hardly tell to the touch that they were there.

What you saw applied to the current-state cabinets is a thin coat of high-adhesion primer (the Zinsser Smart Prime product was something I bought when I was painting the office pegboard and IKEA shelving, and I had a lot of that gallon leftover for this and future projects). It really does seem to adhere well to surfaces, better than standard drywall primer at least. I may be swayed by marketing promises though; I’m a sucker to try anything that promises something comparable oil-base paint performance.

I don’t have any painting-in-progress shots; it was a 15-minute thaaang. Plus, I was too preoccupied with finishing the last two episodes of the second season of The Glades, which we put off too long from the October to-do list, but enjoyed whole-heartedly. Gosh, that Jim Longworth is so sly. Anyone know with certainty if it’ll be picked up for a third season?

If you looked closely at the before + after photo, maybe you noticed that in addition to patching lock holes and priming those suckers, I also added new drawer pulls. Snazzy. Each was $4.98 at Home Depot, markedly less than similar models I scoped out at Lowe’s, but still sizable for impact, shown scaled next to my own hand.

I realized shortly after deciding to install them that I’ve never actually had to install new drawer handles, let alone dually-reinforced handles where there weren’t already holes (the other ones I replaced in the office took advantage of the existing holes). Purposefully, I planned to do this install at the primed-phase (not into the finished paint), meaning that it would have been easy to patch any mis-drills, re-sand, re-prime, and you wouldn’t have known otherwise. And I’m not fudging this, I did it perfect the first time. Don’t tell me that they’re a hair out of place, ok?

And that’s not all, folks. What you can’t tell by looking at that picture is that I made some tweaks to the interior of one of the units.

Because we didn’t expect to need two entire cabinets for our files, I created a monster, that being a double-decker storage drawer. That’s right. One operational drawer, doubly deep, rollin’ smoothly.

It was actually easier than I envisioned. The bottom of the top drawer slipped out of place pretty easily with a little bit of screw-loosening. Tightened back up, it was the same drawer, without the bottom.

I re-worked the piece of trimwork that you see separating the drawers so that it’s actually attached to the drawers, not the cabinet frame, so that both drawers move in unison on their existing tracks. Brillance.

The double-decker drawer allows miscellaneous office items to be hidden away. We started with the shredder, which fits like a charm.

Next up: Black Friday area rug shopping. That should help to guide filing cabinet paint colors. Affordable suggestions welcomed.