After Sarah told me about ‘Campaign’ furniture (discovered on Little Green Notebook), I was fortunate enough to find a vintage desk of this style at Goodwill. It never hurts to always keep an eye out for rare finds while shopping in thrift stores! It was in pretty good shape and clean when I purchased it, but I wanted the desk to stand out even more. My goal is to take projects at a slower pace and make sure that I put quality into my work. So I began with simply removing the hardware on the desk to clean it and to make it easier to paint. On a vintage piece of furniture, it is important to preserve the condition as much as possible.
The first step I took towards safely removing the hardware was to use a small flat screw driver to pry underneath the metal. Once there was a small gap between the metal and wood, I worked on prying the next part of the metal piece. When the nails are 20% out of the wood, I stopped and grabbed a pair of pliers.
With the pliers, I directly pulled the nails out of the wood and made sure to not lose the nail. This part of the process prevents the wood from getting damaged by the screw driver.
Before closing the drawers, and never being able to open them again, I made duct-tape tabs as drawer-pulls for easy access.
After all the nails were pulled, I placed all the matching pieces on a piece of tape to keep for later re-placement. All of the hardware was placed into a labeled zip-lock so that it wouldn’t get lost or thrown away.
My next step for the desk is to paint it with primer. More Campaign Desk Refurbishing posts to come!
Room to Think 
