Cute Ways to Refinish a Desk

Painting

• Painting your desk lets you unleash your creativity. You can choose from any color of the rainbow, and of course you don't have to stop with one color. Choose a coordinated color palette, such as jewel tones, juicy brights or pastels, and paint the legs one color, the apron another, the drawers a third color and the top and drawer pulls yet another color. Another option is one of the many distressing techniques such as crackling or layering different colors and sanding the edges. If you're the artistic type, you could paint freehand flowers, swirls, bunnies or any other whimsical motif on your desk.

Staining

• Staining wood a natural tone in the brown family is a traditional, expected look, but you make your desk cute by using a fantasy stain color such as purple, blue or pink. Although the colors are nontraditional, they go on in the same manner as natural-hued stains and let the beauty of the wood grain shine through.

Stenciling

• Stenciling is easier than freehand painting and is a way for less artistic people to embellish their projects with paint. With stenciling, you place a cutout pattern on your furniture piece, then paint inside the cutout. Pull the stencil up to reveal a precisely painted design. Stencils are available in a multitude of cute shapes and motifs, including letters, and you can purchase them at craft stores.

Decoupage

• You can radically change the look of your desk with decoupage. Decoupage is the art of covering something with bits of cut paper. You can cut up cute or interesting pictures from magazines, pretty wrapping paper, maps, patterned scrapbooking paper or solid-colored craft paper. Arrange the pieces artfully over the desk and apply them to the piece with decoupage medium, which doubles as a glue and attractive finish.

Metal Leafing

• While you may be tempted to simply spray-paint your desk in metallic paint, resist the urge to do so, and instead metal-leaf your desk. Metal leafing produces a look that is similar to metallic paint. However, metal-leafed pieces have a richer shine, a deeper shimmer, and an artfully imperfect, textural finish. Metal leafing is more trouble than paint, but is worth it. Metal leafing involves covering your piece with spray adhesive, then rubbing or burnishing on very thin sheets of shimmering metal so that the metal leaf adheres to the piece.