The Truth Behind DIYs

I have a confession. I spend hours every week watching HGTV. (For those of you unfamiliar with this channel, it stands for Home and Garden Television.) HGTV is full of hints, projects, tips, and fantastic before-and-afters, so it is quite easy for a soon-to-be home owner to become addicted. There is a downside, however. Because each show takes only a half hour, one might (incorrectly) assume that attempting a similar project would also take a very short amount of time. Not a half hour, of course, but certainly not days! One would be wrong. After the success of our bench DIY, Robby and I decided to refinish an old desk we have. We enlisted a pro (my mother in law) to help us and began the ordeal yesterday. It is now Sunday night, a day later and hours into the project, and our desk looks like this:
It does not take being Ty Pennington to see that the above desk is not finished. In fact, it is in pieces with hints of the awful blue paint still holding on for dear life. Lest you think we did not work as hard as we could have, let me give you a quick recap of what we did.

Before: A white desk that needs some new life.

Robby getting ready to strip. (Haha...the paint, of course.)

After coating the desk and drawers with this paint stripper, we used a spatula to scrape what we could off. The top white layer came off like a charm, but underneath was another story. This blue turned into something more like finger paint. We are all still unsure what this substance is, but it made the project extremely difficult. After scraping, we wiped the surface down with mineral spirits, scrubbed, and dried as best as we could.

Next steps: Sand and paint.

More pictures to come later in the week!