Today I’m going to show you how I built my super huge, granite inlaid solid wood desk.
Each of these chunks right here are pieces of granite that I got for free from a counter
shop that was just throwing them away.
The legs are made of piping and I’ll explain a little bit more about that as well.
So here’s where I’m at so far.
I’m making a giant, 7 foot long granite inlaid desk.
I got these three quarter inch thick ones just because it will take less wood out of
the desk.
I have some thicker pieces of granite, but when you’re taking that much wood out of
the total desk space it’s going to leave it pretty structurally unsound.
So the thinner the pieces of granite are, the more sturdy the desk will be.
I have a bunch more granite slabs over there.
As far as positioning of the granite goes, I have this piece right here which used to
be one.
I thought it would be pretty cool to spread them out a little bit.
And then as far as the rest of them go, I kind of want to keep the same grain of the
granite.
Even though these are entirely different, chunks that are broken off, they have that
dark streak kind of going left to right.
I want to kind of keep that uniform throughout the table to keep a general theme of it.
And then as I’m using my plunger-outer to cut out the holes.
I have marked this with a pencil and I’ve left a little piece of wood right here so
as I router out this space around here, this will keep it steady and even with the top
of the table so I don’t end up with uneven chunks at the bottom, and I’ll show you
what I mean later on.
Now all I have to do is finish routing out the other slots for the other pieces of granite
and I’ll figure out how to fill this gap between the granite and the wood.
I’ve started to seal the blocks down into the wood.
I’ve taken some liquid nails and some wood glue and I’ve dripped it into the hole and
then set the granite slabs on top of that to kind of seal it into the back of the wood.
And then I started taking wood filler and putting it around the outside of the granite
and the inside of the wood and that’s worked out pretty well so far.
One thing that really helped me lay the wood filler in-between the granite and the wood
is when I started I was using my finger and a knife and putting it in-between, but it
was spreading out too far in the wood and I’m afraid that’s going to look bad when
I finally stain it.
So what I did is I bought one of these dollar ketchup dispensers from Walmart and filled
it up with the wood filler, and then I can take it and squeeze it into the crack between
the granite and the wood and that makes it a lot less messy.
I also tried an experiment with the liquid nails.
Liquid nails says it’s stainable so we’re going to find that out.
I used these two front pieces entirely with liquid nails.
So I’m going to take those and sand them down later, clean them up and then we’ll
see how well they stain.
What’s nice with the wood filler though, is that I can take it and it’s rough right
now, but as soon as it’s going to dry it leaves it a little bit tacky and you can just
tap it down into the hole and kind of clean up that hole a lot better than it would normally.
One block left and then I’ll let it dry for a day and then stain it and see what happens.
Let me talk for a minute about the base that I’m using for the desk.
It is a pipe base.
Basically the whole thing is made out of pipes.
Starting with this leg here you can see that I have the base and then I have a t-joint
after a 4 inch straight piece.
And then that branches out.
And I’m going to link all of the different parts of this base in the video description
below.
I’ll put a link there to where all the parts are.
So I have this bar right here space as the two legs.
Then I have another t-joint up here that moves across, and a t-joint here that moves up.
So there are a total of 4 legs around the side that you can see here.
And then there’s the one leg here, up in the center, that goes up towards the back.
That’s where my monitor stand is going to be so this adds another little bit of support
in the center of the back of the desk.
And I’ve put all of my weight on that and it even distributes it down these legs over
here which is really nice.
So the desk is going to be pretty darn sturdy.
Another thing that’s nice about the desk is that the garage floor isn’t quite even,
you can see that there’s a little bit of discrepancy between the concrete slabs, but
at each of the joints you can see the base, the 4 inch piece and the t-joint, you can
screw it in a little bit more or a little bit less and then the top will be exactly
where you want it.
So I learned a couple things while staining the top of this desk.
A) Stain does stick to granite, so I’m going to have to find a way to get that off.
After I noticed that, I did switch around and start taping off the pieces of granite
so hopefully the rest of them won’t end up quite as marked up.
Now it’s all uncovered and ready to be put in the office - slash my bedroom.
So I’m getting the base of the table all screwed into place, and all of the tops are
measured so they’re all the exact same height.
So I’m pretty happy with how the desk turned out.
I used two different types of granite just to kind of see how they would differ.
So we have the white granite in the back, and that’s just like a matte finish.
It’s not super glossy or anything, and I think it looks alright.
But I actually prefer this darker granite right here that is super glossy.
You can see the refection of the light right there and the door frame.
So I think having a bunch of super glossy pieces embedded in the wood would look really
cool.
The one thing that I would do differently, is I tried using liquid nails right here because
it said it was stainable.
It actually did not stain very well and I don’t like how it looks.
I mean it’s not terrible, but where I used the wood filler it blends in a lot easier
with the granite.
So next time I will use wood filler for all of the granite pieces instead of liquid nails.
So what’s fun about this set up is I have my new desk here and I have my old desk here.
And if you remember, this is the one I did the wireless charging through the bottom of
the desk.
I’ll post a link for that video here as well.
And so since it’s right next to my bed I can just take my phone, put it right on my
desk and have it wirelessly charge through the desk during the night.
This is also where I do all my phone repair videos as well.
I’ll set up my light box and my camera mount and tripod here so I can film those videos
right next to my editing station.
So this is it.
And as you can tell it’s pretty darn sturdy.
[Clap]
Thanks a ton for watching.
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Thanks for watching!