Laminate Office Furniture-- I'll Take it!

So when we sold our house this year, we also decided to get rid of lots of our old furniture.  Over the years, we had collected mismatched furniture.  When my husband and I were furnishing our first home we shopped garage sales and took freebies.  Don’t get me wrong, I was fortunate to have found these deals and donations.  Till this day, I still can’t believe the dining room table and 8 dining chairs we scored for $40.  We still have the dining room chairs, although I did have to make some slipcovers to cover their pink seats and brown faux leather backs.  Ick.  Thank goodness for slipcovers.

In our old office, we had garage sale mismatched IKEA shelves, a clearance priced filing cabinet and a desk my husband had from his college days.  None of the furniture had any style.  They were not made out of solid wood and were laminate pieces.  In my error to try and force some cohesion on the room, I decided to paint the desk and filing cabinet white.  Bad move.  Learn from my mistake… Don’t just use any kind of primer.  Make sure it is an OIL based primer (eg. Zinsser Cover Stain Oil based primer) then use whatever latex paint you want on the next coats.  The paint never adhered properly and would come off in chunks easily.  My Bad.  Lesson learned.

Needless to say, we garage saled our poor desk and filing cabinet before we moved.  After we were in to the new house, we needed to find a new desk solution.  I wanted to find pieces of furniture on Kijiji and refinish them white for our new office.  My husband was quite leery of this option (I can’t blame him, especially since my last office furniture painting experience was a disaster).  We compromised and settled on getting new furniture from Source Office Furnishings.  I know… still laminate, not my first choice.  But at least it all matches, has a clean look and is not as expensive as real solid wood. 

Here is what we chose…


We got a 3 drawer filing cabinet and a storage cabinet, which we placed in the corner by the window.  Then a ‘U’-shaped desk with a hutch on top.  All pieces are espresso in color. 



So far, so good.  Looks like I’ll have to find some other furniture to experiment on!

As Always,
Sandra