Santa’s Workshop: Two Special Christmas Presents!

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Happy New Year, dear friends! For our first post of 2025, really a Christmas-crossover post, I thought I’d share Santa Chapman’s special projects he worked on for our grandson for Christmas. He began the weekend before we were planning on leaving for our trip, so he had to work long hours, but everything turned out great!

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Santa in his workshop

“Santa” had to tape off different parts of an old desk which had been in his parents’ family since Charles was a child. This desk had a flower-strewn contact paper on the desk top which covered old scratches. It was originally rubbed on by my mother-in-law, Gini, so the desk could be used. This was back in the late 1960’s or 1970’s.

We picked up some wood-grained contact paper to replace it, but our son liked the desk the way it was without any contact paper on it and so did I. I think the scratches show the history of the desk when it belonged to its first owners.

Here you can just see Charles taping off the edges of that desk top as he was finishing scraping off the old contact paper. I wish I had taken a photograph of the paper as it was pretty cute! Definitely 1970’s era!

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Here is the spray paint chamber created with a large box and plastic we have used many times to cover furniture for painting inside the house. This worked really well! We were blessed with warm weather all before Christmas so during the day Charles was able to have the garage door either fully open or partially open as he painted each piece.

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Our grandson said his favorite colors are “Red and golden,” so Grampa Santa decided to repaint our daughter and son’s old tricycle red again, and the desk in two-toned bright red and an antique gold.

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Drying the paint

Drying times varied upon whether the pieces were painted at night when temps dropped into the high 30’s or 40’s, or during the day when it was warmer. Charles set up our portable heater as needed to help speed paint drying times. He also used the orange fan to drive the really strong paint smell away from the door into our house.

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I cannot tell you how awful it was the first night to wake up with the taste of paint n my mouth, ick! But, putting up with the paint smell for a few nights was worth it for how well these two Christmas presents turned out!

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The gold spray paint was the last to go on, as you can see. So much more taping off needed!

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Thankfully, the desk had been wrapped in a ton of clean paper from when my mother-in-law moved from California to Texas. This was obviously reused. 🙂

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Just a few last looks….

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Each piece was carefully placed into plastic boxes for travel in the back of our truck and around 11am on Christmas Eve morning, we made our way towards South Dakota where our son and family live.

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One happy Christmas boy!!!

And here is Grampa Santa looking very much the part with his scruffy white whiskers. (He could grow mutton chops, by the way!)

Santa Chapman is showing young Milo how the screws attached to the desk keep the top open (so no pinched fingers or having the top drop on his head!).

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I hope you have enjoyed this post!

Let me know what fun things you made or did for your kids and grandkids (or spouses or significant others) this year for Christmas. Always a labor of love…

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Blessings to you,