Since the last time I wrote, in the middle of auditioning for and getting cast in a show, starting rehearsals, entering the home stretch on a 2 year program at work, and several other big things I have going on, I actually got around to starting the actual build of my desk. I worked out all the wood width issues so I finally have the entire surface that I can lay out which was pretty cool.
At the recommendation of several friends, I finally went and bought a biscuit joiner partly using an old gift card I found laying around. The biscuit joiner is such a cool tool and definitely fits into that category of things that I am probably not going to use very often, but when it is needed, it is THE perfect tool. If you are unfamiliar with it as I was a couple weeks ago, it is basically just a couple rails for lining things up along with a 4 inch circular blade on a string so you can plunge it into wood making a small slot that is exactly the same distance from the top surface in each cut. You then use a small football shaped piece of wood along with glue to match two of those slots in wood you want to join. In total by desk is going to have 63 biscuits joining the base together and then all of the aspen in the top surface.
Once I had everything together, I ended up spending a few days to test out my complete process on a few scrape pieces. I took an extra plank and cut it in half. I joined them using the biscuits and added the edge trim. I then went to town sanding, staining, and polyurethaning. I am not pretty confident that I am going to be really happy with the final results. I also used this to do one more very important check. I tested using my computer mouse on the surface since it would be pretty sad if I built the whole desk and then discovered my mouse wouldn’t work on it.
Having all that done, I have joined the base pieces and I have now started the gluing process for the top boards. This is, by far, the scariest part of the process. Up until now, any mistakes would only cost be the price of a single board. Once I get to staining, and mistake will cost be a couple hours to re-sand everything. If I screw up the gluing it is going to be really bad. I measured everything about 10 times and have a ton of marks to let me know if I am lining things up correctly because I am finding that using glue with the biscuits means that the boards get locked in place really quickly so I have to get them in place instantly.
Here is the thing, I like to think I can do most things I attempt with some level of success. Almost universally, starting something because I figure I can do it does not make me an expert. This gets me frustrated when trying to meeting my personal expectation of perfection. I am definitely making progress, and I am happy about that, but each step of the way seems to present some new thing that doesn’t work they way I want it to. First I had the stain issue, where I didn’t understand the kind of wood I was working with and just couldn’t get it to do what I wanted to. My original assumption is that I was staining all wrong, but it turns out that my choice of wood was wrong. The next couple of issues came with trying to get the wood cut for the desk surface.
Having laid out the MDF base for the desk, my next step was to cut all the pieces of aspen to be the table surface. I calculated how many of the boards I would need and stopped by Lowe’s on the way home from work and picked up several planks of 1×8 aspen. It is here I would like to take a brief moment out of my story to address the married men out there. Men, when you tell your wife you are stopping by the hardware store to pick up some wood on the way home, you should really specify a rough estimate in time. You should not say “I am not sure how long it will be, but it may take awhile”, because when you say “awhile” she will assume, quite reasonably, that you mean about 15 minutes and not the 1 hour it actually takes you to decided what to get and then get the lumber guy to cut it for you so that you can fit giant pieces of wood in your tiny Mazda 3. You will then have to apologize for not getting home to eat the dinner she cooked as early as she had planned.
Anyway, I cut it up in 30 inch chunks and laid it out on top of base to see how they fit and see how much of the end boards I needed to trim to get it all to fit nicely. Instead, what I found is that they came up about 2.5 feet short. How could this have possibly happened with all my careful planning and designing in SketchUp? This brings me to reason-I-am-not-an-expert 2. No matter how many times I work with lumber, at some point I always incorrectly assume one of the labeled measurements is the actual measurement. I immediately knew that the 1x8s weren’t 1 inch think. I knew they would be about 3/4 of an inch. That knowledge did not carry over to knowing that they were not 8 inches, but rather 7.25 inches. That makes a big difference across 13 boards. Ugh. Now it has to wait for another trip to Lowe’s for another board.
Although I already told you what the final plan was, before I got there I still had to do some stain samples. This is what completely saved me from my original design since it would have been a disaster that I wouldn’t have known about until I had already spent all the money. I now consider it beyond required to make the samples and figuring out exactly what I am doing and if it is even going to work. That being said, it is a huge pain. Mostly, since the samples are really only about 4 square inches, the take about 2 seconds to do, and yet the paint brush gets just as dirty as doing the entire desk, which means cleaning up the oil based stain and polyurethane takes just as long. So the process ends up being: sand for 5 minutes to get everything smooth, 2 seconds to cover it in stain, wait 5 minutes and wipe clean, let it dry, repeat stain and wiping, clean brush for 10 minutes. I did this a bunch of times.
Once I had a stain and poly sample that I was really happy with, it was time to finally begin construction. Part of my final design was to use a plywood base for the table surface and then just trim the front to hide it all. The hope here was that it would make it easier to get a solid, flat desk. The other huge advantage is that it let me buy one sheet of plywood (along with a couple 2x4s) and build the first part of the desk to serve as a mockup to make sure I liked the height and size of the desk without having to buy the more expensive solid wood. The width of the wall is 111 inches and so the desk will match that. While the final top surface will be one solid piece, structurally the desk will be in three sections. The center section will be 39 inches and plenty wide enough for me to to use with my current 3 monitor and 2 computer setup. The right side will be for all the other equipment needed on the desk: printer, router, modem, etc, and then eventually a filing cabinet below the desk. The left side is being designed so that a second person can set there and either use a laptop or the second computer. Having the three sections gives me good places to put the support legs that I will have to have since I have no interest in trying to create a floating surface that long that I feel confident putting all that computer equipment on.
On my trip to the hardware store, I ended up switch from plywood to MDF as the base material. I actually sat in the isle of Home Depot debating between the two. The price was effectively the same so that didn’t matter. The MDF is a good deal heavier. This is still a little bit of a concern because I will be building it downstairs in the garage and installing it upstairs in my office. I am just going to have to hope that 2500 cubic inches of MDF plus 2500 cubic inches of aspen end up being a manageable weight for me and whatever friend I wrangle into helping me move it.
The original coloring and grain pattern I was looking for was largely driven by wanting to do an Elpha shelving system on the wall. They had a few limited color selections for their solid shelves and I went with the one closest to the surface of my current desk. I don’t entirely remember the process of events, but I settled on switching to a dark grey, almost black wood grain colored shelf and trying to match the desk to that. I also switched from surface out of three very long pieces of poplar running from left to right to 13 pieces of aspen running front to back. Somewhere along the way I also switched from solid wood legs, to 4 metal legs and braces on the wall.
Although I am primarily focused on the desk here, the rest of the office is planned and waiting for the desk since it is not only the largest piece, but the only one I am making from scratch. Everything else sort of has to work around the desk. I have gotten several comments about the fact that I am going with grey walls, particularly since there will be a black desk, and a dark grey couch as well. Although I actually just really like grey, there is actually a very specific reason. One of the biggest things I use my office for is photo editing for Goforth Photography. When I do that editing, getting the coloring correct is very important. The human eye, with its amazing design, is able to adjust to what it is seeing without us being aware. I really wanted to use a bright green or orange, but that could have caused all my photos to come out with a slight color cast that I didn’t want, since it would have looked fine right in front of my neon green walls, but not so much every where else. Instead I am going with completely neutral grey and adding some bright colors in some of the accents in the room.
The couch I bought on sale in April from World Market. Its box was soon sacrificed to become costumes for Amy’s production of Beauty and the Beast (if you happen to have caught that show, it appeared as the Wardrobe and Cogsworth if I remember correctly). Since then, it has been sitting in our spare bedroom waiting to be put together in the final room. There will most definitely be a large white board, because as the cubical trained engineer that I am, I need a whiteboard to really think about a problem. Mind you, I don’t necessarily need to write on it, just stand in front of it hold a dry erase marker. I could potentially add an Ikea bookshelf, but since I am already adding 36 square feet of shelf space, I am going to wait on that.
Once I was ready to actually design the desk, there was only one way to go: SketchUp. If you have never heard of it, it is an amazing and free program owned by Google. It allows you to easily create 3D models. After we bought our house, I built a complete model of our house and major furniture and we could play around with where everything was going to go before we moved in, thus saving my back the hassle of doing it in the physical world. For the desk, it let me try all kinds of things and see what they would look like without having to spend a dime.
At this point, Amy didn't have her own office so I was planning on building to allow us both to use it.
My biggest obstacle for the desk was going to be that the 9ft that I needed was 1ft longer than all the natural options, so I started with a trip to Home Depot to do some research into what was available. I knew I was going to have to join wood together to create the top surface but I didn’t want big open area with a few sparse seams obviously dictated by the standard sizes of lumber. I also wanted to end up with a stained wood finish so it needed to be stain quality stuff that I could get smooth enough to work well with a mouse.
On that first trip I discovered that they carried 3 types of wood in lengths longer than 8ft: red oak, poplar, and southern pine. The southern pine was out immediately for having too many knots. The oak was out because I didn’t particularly like the look of the open grain. That left the poplar which I thought looked exactly like I wanted it to. Wonderful, perfect, problem solved. I ran home and designed an office to work around using the poplar for the top surface.
And for several busy month, I fully intended to use that plan…right up until I went and got a sample to test stain colors on. It was then that I learn that poplar is horrible to stain. It works great to paint, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Some what defeated, I put the whole thing on the back burner for awhile until I could come up with a better solution which is where I will pick up next time.
Since the last time I wrote, in the middle of auditioning for and getting cast in a show, starting rehearsals, entering the home stretch on a 2 year program at work, and several other big things I have going on, I actually got around to starting the actual build of my desk. I worked out all the wood width issues so I finally have the entire surface that I can lay out which was pretty cool.
Once I had everything together, I ended up spending a few days to test out my complete process on a few scrape pieces. I took an extra plank and cut it in half. I joined them using the biscuits and added the edge trim. I then went to town sanding, staining, and polyurethaning. I am not pretty confident that I am going to be really happy with the final results. I also used this to do one more very important check. I tested using my computer mouse on the surface since it would be pretty sad if I built the whole desk and then discovered my mouse wouldn’t work on it.
Having all that done, I have joined the base pieces and I have now started the gluing process for the top boards. This is, by far, the scariest part of the process. Up until now, any mistakes would only cost be the price of a single board. Once I get to staining, and mistake will cost be a couple hours to re-sand everything. If I screw up the gluing it is going to be really bad. I measured everything about 10 times and have a ton of marks to let me know if I am lining things up correctly because I am finding that using glue with the biscuits means that the boards get locked in place really quickly so I have to get them in place instantly.
