The start of the new desk

I bought this desk about 9 years ago from Staples.  In the store it didn't seem so big!  We got it home to the rental apartment and it took up half our living room! Grandpa had gave all us grandchildren our inheritance (minus what we may have owed him and never repaid (let's just say Karrie didn't get a full amount, ha!)) and I wanted a desk for our new-to-us computer (you know, so I could play Solitaire in comfort....).  I also bought the chair at the same time.  As you can see, it's lived a rough life, but it still holds me and doesn't dump me on the floor or anything, so I just keep duct taping the ripped parts!  Looking back now, I'm not sure what I loved about the desk.  I've been craving desk drawers with a filing cabinet and one big flat open surface.  You probably can't tell, but I even took off the top shelf piece on the desk to make more room for my super tall, all powerful, pretty, lit up tower.

Back in October, we brought home a super ugly, seen better days, door from my Dad's place.  It was actually the door off of the very first addition we ever had on our trailer.  It was also green on one side, brown on the other, and chippy and dirty all over.  It's sat in the basement ever since we brought it home, but this last weekend we decided to head out to my Dad's and get going on my new desk.

The plan was to scavenge any usable parts off of the old desk for the new one.  The old one had been moved more times than the press board was up to, so I decided to re-use parts off of it and will probably end up tossing the rest of it.  First up, stealing the legs off of it.

Let's ignore the dust, okay?  The plan was to take the metal legs off of this one, go to Dad's, cut them down, re-weld them, re-paint them, and attach to the new top.  I don't know if you can see them or not, but the legs had holes near the top of them to run your power cords through, to keep your desktop neat and tidy.  (It also at one point had a power bar mounted underneath the top shelf to help with the cord situation.  Maybe that's what drew me to it?  I don't know.  Distracted by organization and technology! Ha!)

We soon discovered one little issue with those cord holes.  I remember sitting at my desk and noticing one of the little kids standing near by and sort of giggling while toys were slowly disappearing from their hands.  Children always have a way of figuring these things out...

Can you see?  Over the years, even though I told them to stop, they had been slowly filling up the leg with anything that would fit!  Since both the top and bottom of the legs were sealed, I could never get the stuff out.  I had actually totally forgotten that they used to do that until the leg was off and something was moving around in there. 

Here's their collection over the years.....

A whole lot of chips (ew), a half melted chocolate bar (double ew, apparently someone didn't like the taste of it, and I can tell you I didn't like the feel of it either!!), crayons, wooden blocks, a whole package of Halls Centres(!), a bouncy ball, a car (which Blade promptly reclaimed, even though you know it was him who put it down there to begin with!!), and even poor Dora ended up in the tube.   There was actually two more blue blocks in there too, that I just couldn't seem to convince to come out.  Mmmmm... half a Cheeto anyone?