Show & Tell: Scrap Craft Desk

I have a rickety old desk in my office. My husband eyed it at Sandusky Street Antiques, and appreciated its folksiness.

I like tucking things in drawers and this desk has six! Plenty of room for notecards, pens, and glue sticks. The only thing about rickety old desks is sometimes the drawers stick instead of slide. There are no runners, only wood on wood, but I know a trick. My friend's grandmother, a collector of antiques and an antique herself, suggests soap. (Rub a bar of dry soap on the wooden surfaces that touch. Results: reduced friction and a furniture that temporarily smells like Dove.)

When I pulled the first drawer out to soap the bottom, I noticed this on the side! This desk may have had some other life before it was just a rickety old desk.

Or, was the artisan just practicing his scroll technique for the outside of the desk?

There are flowers like these on the bottoms of two of the drawers where no one could even spy them, unless, like me, you're soaping the drawers. 

 I found this label when I removed the bottom, right drawer.  According to the web, in 1875 the A. B. Chase Company began making organs and then pianos in Norwalk, a business which continued until 1930. 


Is this desk made of piano parts? I wonder.