Building a DIY Home Office? 247
Rednerd asks: "I just moved into a new apartment and I'm almost done painting and running the cat 5. I have been looking at office furniture for a new desk to become the new home for all of my misc. computer gadgetry, but I haven't been able to find anything that really fits. (No one seems to sell a desk with room for two 19" monitors, seven computers, a beer fridge, coffee maker, and a small compartment to serve as a shrine for my little plush penguin - Potelé) I'm leaning toward building a custom desk for my computers. With all the talk on Slashdot about creating an ultra-efficient cubicle, I was wondering what other slashdotters have created in the way of DIY home offices?"
IKEA? (Score:2, Informative)
AnthroCart (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and it is almost worth buying something just to see their packaging: 2 inch thick corrugated cardboard!
For the record, I don't work for Anthro and have no relatives or friends who do, I just own one of their desks and like it very much.
Re:IKEA? (Score:3, Informative)
A cheaper, better alternative (if "looks" aren't important) is either plywood sheets or door blanks set on filing cabinets. Buy veneered plywood (oak or cherry) and it'll look as good as anything IKEA ever sold.
For a sleek modern look, buy some old steel filing cabinets from a used office supply place and strip the paint off of them until they're a nice brushed steel.
Cabinets (Score:2, Informative)
Most cabinet suppliers now carry a home office line. The possibilites are unlimited and you can find things in almost any price range.
$50 desk (Score:2, Informative)
but here is my thirteen cents worth.
Go to Home Depot (or your local lumberyard), along the way grab/steal/obtain one of those hard to find lumber carts...then:
Select a Solid Core Oak Door. SOLID. not hollow.
usually about $45-$50
Take it home, polyurethane or paint it to your hearts delight...(satin black was my choice)
then...
grab two of your file cabinets...one on each end
throw the door on top and voila!
one helluva strong computer desk.
If you are as motivated a good friend of mine...cut a 4" drop shelf out of the back-center of the door as wide as (2) 19" monitors, and drop supports, and voila, a nice cozy place for them expensive monitors, but wait there's more...add a few pieces of plywood and some dowels and glue and voila, now you have a shelf over those 19" monitors. If you have a router handy, give the edges of the door/desk a rounded top and sand to smooth.
Note:
this is HEAVY solution but cheap and effective.
HON file cabinets work great as supports.
Similar problem - retail desks are small! (Score:3, Informative)
All low cost solutions....but no high end stuff... (Score:5, Informative)
Sligh [sligh.com] furniture carries a line of home office furniture that looks like conventional furniture (hutches, desks, cabinets, etc). It's modular, of very high furniture quality, and really functional. Best of all, it looks like it belongs in a home and not an office or spacecraft or sterile.
But, it is pricey. We're in the process of finishing our basement which now includes a home office with 16 network jacks, 25 dedicated ground outlets and, I think, 8 phone jacks. We've got a built-in storage cabinet that will house my networking gear and UPS to help keep the office uncluttered. Additionally, we're looking at a printer cabinet that will house my laser printer, and a dedicated print server and probably our fax machine.
The kids play area also has a builtin dedicated computer desk (networked, of course) and place for an ink-jet printer and phone. Having one's own home with an unfinished area is a bonus as I have the luxury to do it right and not have to retrofit.
Yeah..I had to take a loan out for this...but when people say there are no decent computer furniture, that applies to people who are:
1) either not willing to really look or
2) don't have a budget for the more expensive stuff or
3) need a temporary arrangement (like a student moving into a dorm). In this case, rule #2 (or #1) usually applies.
I do however, applaud all the people who have responded with solutions that are truly functional for them and on a relatively low budget. It shows ingenuity and that necessity truly is the mother of invention.
And, I have to admit that sometimes I wish my wife would let me splurge and get some really off the wall stuff. Personally, I prefer the high tech look. But, for a home that I may have to resell someday, that isn't the most practical solution.
Cheers,
RD
Re:Metro Shelving...Bakers' Racks (Score:3, Informative)
One thing, though. Don't follow the instructions on putting them together. Take one shelf, put it upside down on the floor. Assemble the tubes, put them into the upside down shelf. Put your first shelf near the bottom, put the next one wherever you like, pick up the whole thing and remove the upside down shelf. I can get a set together in under 10 minutes this way.
Glass (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, my desk is in an alcove about 1.5m wide by 1m deep. It's constructed of a single sheet of tempered glass 6mm thick supported on three sides by 1" square blocks of wood bolted to the walls.
There are gaps in the support blocks at the back for the wires to go through and the glass is pulled slightly forward for them to fit. There's a piece of conduit bolted to the back wall that hides all the cables away.
It holds a 19" monitor, printer and a scanner (plus the inevitable pile of CDs, manuals etc that end up on it).
The effect is amazing, it looks like everything is just hanging there, the supports are painted the same coulour as the walls so they're not very obvious when you first see it. I intend to get a wireless mouse and keyboard to complete the effect at some point.
If you're thinking of doing this, get some professional advice on the glass and supports. I had the glass cut and polished by a specialist company (cost about £60) who worked out how thick it would need to be to support the weight.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned... (Score:3, Informative)
Sturdy.
60$.
I bought a second one for a workbench. The office stores deliver for free also.
Cheapest Source for Metro (Score:2, Informative)
Pull out the yellow pages and track down a store fixture or restaurant supply shop- preferably one that sells used. I've been able to find used stuff at 50% of the industrial price, which is already considerably lower than the consumer retail price.
shaggy dog story (Score:3, Informative)
She also has a yen for antique furniture, and insisted on using a 120 year old partner's desk with its matching chair. The desk was a about eight inches too high to comfortably type, and was almost a foot think (so you couldn't solve the problem by jacking up the chair). It was aslo shaped as a square, with the origional idea being that two peopl would work from either side. My mother's solution was to place the desk in the center of the room, and walk around the thing whenever she needed to get to one of the systems on the other side. Needless to say, after every project, she had horrible back pain and aching wrists (bad enough that she couldn't hold a cup of coffee). And yet, she utterly refused to buy a real desk - "I just can't stand modern furniture!" was her reasoning.
In any event, I decided that the only way I was going to get her to use a real desk was if I built the thing myself, thus guilting her into an ergonimic solution. So, I took measurements of her height, the length of her legs to the knees and to the hip, and the length of her arms, and built a desk to her exact measurements. Fortunatly, my high school offered and woodworking evening activity. I spent about seven months building the thing (it had to hold up nearly a 1000 Kg of equipment, not to mention live up to her tasts for good furniture). In the end, it was four feet deep, fourteen feet long, with two sets of drawers and two vented computer cabinets. If anyone's ever built furniture before, you know what a pain in the ass it is to build drawers, especially big ones! Wood expands and contracts by as much as 5% with humidity and temperature, so big drawers are next to impossible to get right without doing all sorts of strange things to compensate for the changes in geometry. I also had the pleasure (?!!) to have had access to a seasoned trunk of red oak, so I milled the desk surface, leggs and other main parts myself. Since the desk had to be so large and hold up so much weight, I actually found all the available plans and project guides to be utterly useless. The main span of the desk is nine feet, and had to be able to support up to two tons (in case, for instance, someone dropped one of those 20" monitors on it from a few feet in the air, the desk wouldn't collapse and destroy the rest of her equipment).
I ended up turning to bridge design for a workable solution. It had to take into account the high loads, vibration and shock, and expansion and contraction of the material. Basically, I went with a box-girder construction, but with suspension cables inside the box. The suspension cables were nessesary becasuse the joints of the box girder could not simply be fixed to one another, or the surface of the desk would split. Each of the joints is made using lateral rails with ballbearings, like the sliders for a drawer, only much larger. Unfortunatly, this leads to a rather unpleasant amount of gear lash since the bearings require a small amount of play. The suspension cables keep the desk arched slightly upward, instead of bowed downward. This insures that the bearings are aways biased in the same direction so there is no gear lash. Also, the suspension cables are mounted to shock absorbers. Any vibration on the surface is transmitted into the shock absorbers. The result is that the desk surface is only four inches thick at the center, but is strong enough to hold up a small car (or withstand the shock of a 150 Kg object droped from two meters), sturdy enough that you can pound a nail into a block of wood and not skip a CD player a foot away, and flexible enough that it expands an contracts lengthwise by about an inch and a half.
In the end, it cost me about $300 to build the desk, if you assume my time was worthless (I was a high school student, so that was pretty much the case) and you don't count the electricity and heating oil I used up. After graduation, my mother shiped it from Vermont to California - all 400 kilograms of it. I'll leave it as an exersize to the reader to figure out how much more it cost to ship than to build.
She is now happily using a desk built to her exact ergonimic requirements, and has not suffered from back or wrist pain in the four years since she's been using it. It's not quite as pretty as the aincent antiques she's got - but hey, it was my first (and thusfar only) attempt at woodworking.