phil wrote:Hey does the to come off? maybe it's held by screws and could it be removed for clearance? {snips}try wax on the drawer slides, got a candle? use that if it is a traditional drawer with wood guides. dont melt the wax just rub some on.
We did bring it through the window. I'm sitting at it as I type this.
The top does come off, which I found interesting. It has four screws with a very thin flat bracket that were obviously put in place just for that. I'm actually wondering now if it was custom made for the family we bought it from, as Sean and I just talked about when we took it out of there, and we had to turn it sideways to get it through the doors. (Going through a side porch, so interior plus exterior.) I didn't think to check at the time if we could have removed the top. If we had, I'm fairly confident it would have fit as it was just too big when we first tried the usual way before turning it.
The trouble with that it still wouldn't have been enough if we took the top off. The short hallway past the door down to the cellar is only 28 1/2" wide, and that's if we removed the doorknob to the cellar door. Even if we also removed the trim and moulding for more room, that'd give us a bit more, but still not enough. I'm pretty sure code wise, you'd never get away with a hallway this narrow nowadays.
In all honesty, I've been surprised by about how much furniture has not fit here because it's a 1935 home. In my head, I was thinking it's not like a Colonial or a servants' quarters where "comfort" might not have been a priority. First we had the stairs issue, now this. Well, we lucked out with the steel desk in that the footer wasn't rusted, so the screws came out fairly easily. The footers are typical MCM airline style tall, so that left us with just enough height, erm, width since we turned that on its side, to squeeze it down the hallway. We did scrape a bit because I didn't think to take the doorknob off, but the small scrape is an easy fix when I finally resurface the plaster anyhoo. I only recall one screw giving us a bit of trouble, because it wasn't in quite straight.
Speaking of resurfacing the plaster, I recently put a desk lamp (finally) on my desk, and now a glaringly bad patch is all I can see in front of me when the light is on.
Both times we had navigation issues, it made me wonder about the furnishings they had before. Though in all fairness, the downstairs bedroom we use for our office wouldn't have the furnishings we have because I believe it was always a bedroom. It has reminded me (though you'd think I'd never forget after the chifforobe incident) that if we are to move any further furniture down this hallway, we need to measure it beforehand, depending on what it is.
So far as I've seen, no modern repairs other than some later built balsa separator panels for the notched areas in the drawers. There are also a few of the original separators too.
This piece is all solid wood, except for the two side drawer cabinets' side panels and drawer bottoms which have a nice quality sheet good slotted into the supports. The top does seem to be two wide boards with a veneer, which was done amazingly well because if there wasn't a small chip on the one top edge, I would have sworn it was two seamlessly jointed boards for the top. You can't feel the seam at all along the edge facing you when you sit at it. The edges are softly rounded, which may have helped that, rather than harder edges which might catch easier in time. The desk was obviously crafted by one or more folks who take pride in their work. Even the drawer slides have an interesting mild curve to them which seems to ease their movement. On another quality point, all the drawer pulls are wood and just feel like a perfect fit when I put my fingers in to pull out a drawer. They gave the perfect depth to brace your top knuckles before you pull sort of perfect fit. I don't know if that was intentional design or not, but it works so well, and it took me a full day to realize it.
The one oddity we haven't figured out yet is that although there is a lock (no key yet, though) for the center drawer, it doesn't seem connected to the locking rods which prevent the drawers from moving. So the lock is just for that center drawer. At some point, I'll be taking a closer look at that mechanism because I did have a devil with it when I was trying to remove the drawers when it was turned sideways. I found the "button", but Sean somehow got it to work when I couldn't.
There are a lot of small triangular wood brace blocks. One of them jiggled loose during the move, and whenever I get around to refreshing the finish, I'll figure out where that came from. So far, I can't tell.
Yeah, I know we have candles somewhere around here. Just haven't found the box yet. We hit the six month mark of closing a few days ago, and some days I am so annoyed at how many boxes we still haven't unpacked. That's usually a day one at least gets opened to see how mixed up the contents are.