OK this project had been on my mind for a long while. I hated the desk setup I had had for the past 7 years of my life:
The drawers on the sides were separate and poorly constructed. The white IKEA table was so rickety it moved side to side and was really not sturdy. The computer I had was really crappy – I bought it very cheap about 7 years earlier, and the monitors were throw away’s from my uncle’s high school. They were the old school 4:3 aspect ratio. Lastly, the IKEA chair was really uncomfortable after a little while of sitting on it and it made your butt sweat because it was just solid plastic. All-in-all this setup was really really not conducive to getting work done.
Having a great desk was on my bucket list for a long while and I knew at least some of the features I wanted to incorporate:
- I wanted ample desktop space – so likely this meant I was planning to have a small shelf to hold the monitors up off the main surface. Monitor bases take up so much room and it always drives me nuts when there is no space to write on a piece of paper because the whole desk is taken up by the mouse keyboard and monitor bases.
- Ample space also needed to include room for a printer
- I wanted 4-6 drawers. Additionally, I wanted one or two of these drawers to double as filing cabinet drawers for organizing bills and records. All I had at this point was a plastic filing cabinet which I was dying to get rid of. I also had a lot of legal size documents that I was tired of folding up and placing in a regular size filing cabinet drawer so ideally one drawer would be legal sized and the other normal sized.
- Lastly I wanted to make the desk on the cheap – so likely pine again – but I didn’t want to feel like I was damaging the surface of the desk if I was filling out a piece of paper with a pen. Pine, being a soft wood, has a real tendency to easily indent – even if you are just writing on it semi-forcefully with a pen. I’d only ever worked with pine and the cost of hardwood really discouraged me. I settled early on doing the surface out of concrete in some way. I’d seen some DIY tutorials on doing concrete surfaces (either tables/desks or kitchen counter tops) and I figured I should be able to do it. Plus concrete is SUPER cheap! Sold!
So, I came up with a plan and sketched it out in Google Sketch-up.
First task we would try to tackle was the desk top itself. Some folks had made the entire surface out of concrete on their desks – one guy even put lights (/fiber optic cables) inside the concrete! Being my first time working with concrete for furniture I was afraid of doing an upside down mold with melamine (which is what most people recommend). I was somewhat worried that the concrete may not be able to support such a wide gap in the middle of the desk – and this slab of concrete was looking like it was going to weigh a couple hundred pounds, so if this thing broke and landed on your thighs that could be pretty serious.
So, I went the safer route and decided to make a right side-up sort of mold with a melamine base that would be kept in place to support the concrete structure. I made the base with melamine on the bottom and then lined the outside rim with pine so that you couldn’t see the melamine. I Kreg-ed the melamine base to the ripped down 2 x 4 side walls and opted for a simple butt joint so that I didn’t have to worry about the miters coming together perfectly. I also caulked all around the mold to prevent concrete liquid from seeping out or getting into the grain of the wood since I didn’t exactly know what that would do. I got some chicken wire for extra support (trying to mimic rebar) and drove a lot of screws into the side boards so that the concrete would have something to bond to if it did not properly adhere to the wood. The chicken wire was really hard to keep flat so I eventually drove some screws into the base and used some washers to try to keep the chicken wire within the mold.
Next was the harrowing part – mixing and pouring the concrete…I saw some folks used some really fancy countertop concrete that was really fine and had no aggregate (rocks) but that stuff was not available in my Home Depot and was (much more) expensive online. I just went with Quickrete ProFinish5000. We mixed it in the trays you buy at Home Depot and a garden rake. When we mixed the concrete to the proper proportions as the directions indicated the concrete seemed really dry and in some places was still powdery. We slowly added more water and then the concrete got almost too wet. So, I’m pretty certain we added too much water, but as far as I can tell from reading on the internet – that only makes it take longer to dry, it doesn’t hurt the strength of the concrete or anything. Oh right! We also added some charcoal concrete dye from Sakrete (a Lowe’s product) and mixed it to our tastes. This actually presented a little bit of a problem because we mixed two bags of concrete for the whole project and got the color as we liked it. It ended up two bags was not enough for both shelves so we had to buy another and getting the color to match perfectly was a bit touch-and-go but we figured it out okay.
After pouring the concrete and smoothing it as best we could we smacked the sides of the mold with a rubber mallet a bunch and used an orbital sander to vibrate the mold even more to release as many air bubbles as possible. I checked the level-ness of the table and found that it actually wasn’t level which makes sense because garages are usually built with a slope to help drainage. I put some 2 x 4 blocks under one half of the table that was running the length of the garage and that fixed the issue. Once it seemed like we got all of the air bubbles out we did out best to carve our initials and the year into the front corner (this is mandatory for all concrete jobs).
We gave the concrete a solid week to dry and then the real fun began – sanding it. I struggled with this job because I saw a lot of people online used a concrete polishing tool, but I really didn’t want to buy a new ~$100+ power tool for just this one project. We went at it with a belt sander and a helluva lotta sweat.
This took a really long time and burned through easily dozens of the lowest grit belts we could find – but in the end I think it worked really well! We finished the surface with some concrete sealant and once I was pretty satisfied with this product I moved onto the drawer boxes.
I started off by building the cabinet exteriors. I did a ton of measuring and re-measuring to make sure the widths I had on these bodies would translate to a width that would accept a legal sized hanging file. The sides and back of the bodies were made of sanded pine plywood. Then, I cut and screwed in place some cabinet body face plates (don’t know how else to describe them). These face plates (made out of 1 x boards) served to hide the raw plywood edges from the sides. These faces were pretty hard to carefully attach the way I chose to do it. I used Kreg screws in the upper cross support beam and the lower cross support beam. The screws often resulted in the face piece splitting. I did my best to minimize this and unfortunately didn’t add any glue, which I think now would have gone a long way to really securing this on there.
With the cabinet bodies fully constructed I went about attaching the drawer slides to the bodies so that I could measure and get an idea of exactly what width the drawers should be. Most drawer slides (to my understanding) are made so that each slide is 1/2″ wide. This means that the outside dimensions of the drawer itself will be 1″ narrower than the space that the slides are mounted flush to the inside of.
After this I started on the drawer boxes themselves – 6 in total. I wanted to use solid wood as much as possible – I didn’t want to have to construct the drawers out of glued together pieces. This was a little challenging and in fact was probably not the right thing to do. The upper drawers are ~ 2.5″ and ~ 3.5″ tall, the middle drawers are ~ 5″ and ~ 4.5″, and the lower drawers are on the order of 10.5″ tall. This mean that I would need to use 1 x 4’s for the upper drawers, 1 x 6’s for the middle, and 1 x 12’s for the lower drawers. It’s actually pretty difficult to find 1 x planks of pine that aren’t really warped, but I did the best I could. I ripped all the wood down to the right heights to fit the drawer holes I left in the cabinets. I then used a couple new tools I had just added to my arsenal: a jointer (Porter Cable 6″ variable speed bench jointer – PC160JT) and a thickness planer (WEN 6550) which were both highly rated and relatively inexpensive. I used these guys to try make all the wood as uniform thickness and as squared off as possible.
Once all the boards were milled to the right sizes and I was happy with the finish, I set out learning how to do my first dovetail project. I used a Porter and Cable dovetail jig and attempted to rout some of the wood with my Skil 1830 router. Although I love this router when used in concert with my router table, this thing was really really awful for doing dovetails. The router would not hold a constant depth with the plunge base that came with it and I quickly became frustrated and bought the most recommended router for doing dovetails: a DeWalt router (DW618). Needless to say I was a little apprehensive about how many tools I was purchasing for this project but I was confident these were tools I would use a lot going forward and that woodworking would continue to be something I wanted to work on.
I did some practice dove tails (I was going with classic “through” dovetails) on some scrap wood and read the instructions about 2 dozen times and only then did I feel even a little confident in this process. Setting up the jig and labeling all of the work pieces and making sure they are turned the right way is a little tricky the first couple times around and then it gets easier as you do it a few times in a row.
Once the drawer sides were all cut and all of the dovetails were cut I added a 1/4″ groove ~1/4″ up from the bottom. This was meant to support a 1/4″ piece of plywood for the drawer base.
I also added a little bonus feature to the shortest drawer: a flat insert so that the desk space could be augmented. You often see this feature in classrooms or teaching labs and I think it’s a great functional feature. To accommodate this I just routered around the inside of the drawer with a rabbet bit. This left the corners rounded which meant I had to trim the corners of the 1/4″ plywood I used for the surface so that it would fit. I added a little finger hole for you to be able to lift it out.
To allow for file storage I routed little 1/4″ grooves a set length of the way down the inside of the drawer. I bought some hanging folders in legal and standard size so I knew exactly how far apart the grooves should be and then I cut 1/4″ aluminum rods to the right length: voila – filing cabinet drawers. I had not seen anyone else do this out there but it was stupidly simple and also meant that the space didn’t have to be a filing cabinet. The aluminum rods easily come out and then the drawer is just a regular, albeit, deep drawer.
Next was the drawer faces. This one presented a new challenge. The lowest drawer required a 12.5″ tall and 21″ wide (for the legal size) solid piece of wood. This meant that the largest 1 x planks that I could buy (1 x 12’s) would not work and so I would need to glue multiple pieces together to get the required full size. This is exactly what I bought the jointer and planer for! The jointer was critical for getting the glued pieces to match up perfectly. I planed all the wood to the same thickness and then jointed all the edges that would be touching. Then I applied glue and clamped them up. I was amazed (since it was my first time doing this technique) how perfectly the boards matched up. It was like a solid piece – you would never know it was glued together if not for the knots. I know this will be silly for someone who does woodworking regularly but for me this blew my mind and opened up a whole new technique that I would use over and over again. In fact, these glued together faces had fewer issues with warping than did solid single-piece drawer faces.
Once everything was glued up, I chopped down the faces to the appropriate widths (~21″ for the legal side and ~18″ for the standard side) and rounded off the edges with a router. I then set the drawer cabinets on their backs and lined up the drawer faces so that the spacing was consistent and even. Then I clamped them and screwed the drawer faces to the drawers themselves. Then on to staining!
We went with a honey colored stain and applied it to the cabinet front, sides, and back, the drawer faces, and also the pine lining the concrete tops. Once the staining was completed, I carefully lined up the drawer pulls we chose and attached them to the faces by drilling a hole all the way through the drawer face and through the drawer front. Then there was the issue of how to attach all of the pieces together…The main concrete surface weighed about 200 lbs, the smaller shelf was about 50 lbs and the cabinets with the drawers were about 30 lbs each. I was afraid that if I put screws up through the cabinet bodies into the melamine of the concrete top, how would we carry the whole thing to the office without putting too much pressure on those screws causing them to pull out. We carried everything into the office separately and set all the pieces on top of one another and decided to just leave it like that. With the weight of the the two concrete shelves holding everything down this thing isn’t going anywhere. At the same time this weight does not seem to be structurally stressing the plywood cabinets.
Soon after construction we got an office chair from a consignment shop and I got some new widescreen monitors from a friend who works at a school that had a lot of extras.
Our initials and a look at how smooth and glossy we were able to get the concrete. 
