When I originally designed this room
It's purpose was to run my computer business
But since I haven't been doing that for years now
I think it's time for a change
So the first thing I wanted to do
was design a new desk
Thought about buying a new desk
but I really just didn't like any of the designs that were out there
Most of the desks I see are horribly inefficient in their design
Take my desk at work, I literally do not use the back half of the desk
So yeah, in the age of LCD monitors
There's really no need for a desk to be any deeper than say,
24 inches maximum (60cm)
And I can only sit in the center of the desk because of these darn drawers are in the way of my legs
So I went to Google SketchUp and started playing with some ideas
I like some of the cubicles we have at work
They are a very efficient design
So I drew up two cubicles
Now, I share this room with my daughter, so one would be her desk and the other would be mine
There was still one problem with this though
So one of the things that I've wanted for awhile is to have a little of extra space on my desk
Y'know, where I can set up a, occasionally one of my old antique computers
without sacrificing space for my primary computer
So I started working a totally different design
One of the important features of the new desk was to make certain that my legs and feet are free to move around
So once I was done with the design in SketchUp
I decided to draw the design on the floor with masking tape
I was able to confirm that the door would still open fine
as well as what sort of movement I'd be able have with my chair
I was also able to confirm that the largest computer that I own, an Apple IIe,
would comfortably fit on one of the three diagonal areas
I also decided to add some other interesting features
For example,
I could put triangular shaped shelves at each of the corners underneath the desk
This would be an excellent place to a Mac Mini,
or a battery backup, or any external hard drives without cluttering up the top of the desk
So, I'm going to tell you right now I've decided on a very unconventional construction technique
Now, I'm not a expert desk maker,
but in a way that gives me an unique perspective because when I walk though a hardware store
and I look at things, in my mind, rather than seeing
"Well this is what this piece is designed to do", I can look at it from an outside of the box type of perspective,
to say "What can this piece of hardware actually do?", what can it be made to do?
And uh, so I've come up with a very different design, for designing furniture
And uh, some people who probably make furniture gonna be watching this going like this...
but I think, you'll see there's method to my madness and I have very specific goals
And I have opted to not use some conventional techniques for building desks and I think you'll see why
I decided to use these L shape brackets to hold the peices together,
some them weren't entirely 90 degrees so I used the vice at work to bend them to a more precise angle
So one of the benefits to the design I'm using with the brackets is,
that the desk is easy to disassemble, I can literally take it apart, and I can move it somewhere.
uhm,
but the other thing is, is it's also very easy to repair,
should a part break, it's pretty easy to take that part off and make a new one and put it back on.
These shelves that once held hundreds of iBooks and Macbooks,
will now have new purpose as well.
I'm going to turn them into a museum.
So I'm going to be putting on display all of my old computers and game systems and electronics and stuff from the 1970's and 1980's
I think they'll be pretty neat
Okay, so this will be a two part video, and this is just about the end of part one.
Uhm, in part two I'm going to show you uh,
more of the construction and show you more of the secrets and
interesting little ideas I've come up with to make this the ultimate computer desk
I'm also going to attempt to give you a breakdown of the costs of each type of material what not that went into making this
As well as an estimate of the time
So stick around for part two, I think you're going to find it pretty interesting.