Day 341: The Birth of a Home Office

The term "home office" may be generous... but don't tell that to our new desk. There was a mention of it in our last post and now that's it's finished, we're ready to show it to the world. But first, check out this baby I picked up last week:

She's hefty and curvaceous.

Bought it for $25 from a guy who buys at estate sales and sells the stuff at antique stores. It's adjustable (by rotating the chair - nothing too fancy around here) and it swivels! You can lean back pretty far (thanks to a big old spring underneath) and it's decently comfortable for a solid wood chair, but a warm wool blanket never hurts.

You may be wondering how this thing stays afloat since there aren't any legs. This photo pre-finishing may make it a bit easier to explain.

You can see a bit more clearly here that the desk is attached underneath the ledge on the half-wall between our dining and living rooms. The ledge is made of some plywood boards covered in laminate that sit over fir trim lining the top of the wall. The desk is screwed up into the bottom of that plywood and also into the wall through 3" boards on the side and the back. A diagonal bracket was added for extra support and there are a few pocket holes in the back of that attaching it to the wall.

To finish the desk, we bought some wood filler, sand paper, and a can of topcoat. It's amazing what a few minutes with the palm sander can do. This is not plywood meant for nice furniture making but it looks alright after we filled the big gaps and sanded it smooth. The grey paint comes from a few $1 sample cans I picked up from the mistint shelf at the hardware store that we mixed together. I've heard good things about the Minwax water-based Polycrylic topcoat so I bought a can in clear semi-gloss. We did two coats of paint and two coats of the Polycrylic, which dried super fast. It definitely gives the desk a nice finish (evenly shiny but not blindingly so) and it's good to know there's a little extra protection when we inevitably ding the desk in mad fits of chair swivelling.

The magic of wood filler, sandpaper, paint and topcoat

To top it all off, we found this awesome wooden cord grommet at Lee Valley to really up the classiness factor. Still debating about how/if to finish it.

Unruly cables are no more with this little cord grommet

And that's the story of how we made a desk.