Turn a cheap Craigslist desk into an antique beauty

We needed a desk for our office, but could not find one we liked in stores in our price range. So we took to perusing Craigslist on a daily basis (which we still do to this day, you never know what you find). We found this $20 desk.

We decided to stain it black, to do this we bought Minwax PolyShades. This stuff is pretty great, it combines beautiful oil based wood stain and polyurethane in one simple step. All we had to do was sand off the old clear coat layer and used a pre-stain wood conditioner since pine is a soft wood and sometimes blotches when staining. We did two coats on the pieces with a gloss stain.