The majority of furniture in our office is reused. The steel tanker desks and barrister bookcases of the 1950s are indestructible and have a lot of storage space; reuse is part of trying to be green. We’ve had to perform some rust removal and some painting, but overall it’s been a good experience. The biggest issue has been the desk tops: some are steel, some are particle board over steel, and some are linoleum over steel.
The desk seen above has a typing return (on the left) and we’ve used it for interns. The tan linoleum was flat when we got the desk, but shortly afterwards started to curl up, particularly at the front edge. We got some heavy-duty adhesive and glued it back down with a lot of weight (in the form of books) for several days. It was good for a while and then started to curl up again. The force causing the curl was stronger than the adhesive.
My current plan is to sand the glue remnants off of the structural top of the desk and then get a piece of plexiglass cut to size to take the place of the linoleum. We’ve used plexy before, when a top was damaged, and it works fine as long as you don’t mind using a mouse pad: the reflectivity confuses optical mice. But that damaged top was flat, while this one is covered with two generations of hardened glue. So we need to do some extra work.
The most interesting issue is the transient movement of the linoleum. In the picture above, it’s almost flat. At times, it’s been curved enough to separate about 6 inches from the desk. The movement seems to track temperature and humidity, with heat and low humidity causing the top to straighten, and cool and humidity causing it to curl. I guess we could try sealing the underside with urethane and seeing if that would stop the curl, but that feels like more work than sanding and plexy.
