Update : Desk Reconstruction

So My idea for my desk reconstruction is to turn one big desk into a set of nested desks. This would create some extra room and make the  keyboard and mouse position lower and much more comfortable.

I removed the table legs from the desk and measured how deep I wanted it. I'm going to cut it down from 28 inches to 15.  I think two desks that are 15" deep should be fine for me.

So I got a board from Ikea that I think will do well for my lower desktop. I measured it against the current desk and realized it was far too wide, butting up against the legs of the larger table.  If it was to nest under the main table, i would either need to somehow make the main table wider, or the smaller table narrower. In this case I did a little of both.

After removing the veneer on the back and sides of the smaller table's edges, sawing it to size wasn't much of a problem, though as it was really my first go with my new reciprocating saw and I was alone, holding the board with one hand and guiding the saw with the other left some sloppy results with the cut. I later went back and cleaned it up, but it took considerably longer than had I simply waited for Jenn or rich to come home and help hold it down. Sometimes my impatience has a price to pay.

The larger table was a big problem. I should have realized that a wooden object as big as it was should have been much heavier. This third picture is what I found when I cut the back off. 90% of the table is hollow, filled with honeycomb cardboard. This created 2 problems;

1. The places where the legs attach are solid(ish) plywood blocks, and the cut removed the back two. Without them, the back legs have nothing to anchor to.

2. The back edge has no plywood to attach the veneer back onto. Without it you can simply see the cardboard. Additionally, since I removed the plywood edge from the back, what is now the back edge is very flimsy. I don't think it will hold up the weight of my work iMacs.


So here's the plan I came up with; I need the leg blocks, and I need the back spline, but I don't need the top or bottom layers of plywood. If I can manage to remove those I can insert the wood back into the rear edge of the table and all will be right with the world.

So here's the rear section with all the non-essential crap removed. You can see the two leg blocks and the rear spline. I needed at this point to remove the top and bottom layers of plywood, which I quickly found out were wood-glued to the assembly, making them nearly impossible to separate.

Here you can see I managed to chisel off the plywood from the rear spline and saw away the side splines. all that wss left was the plywood above and below the leg blocks. This was the single most difficult thing in the project. After about 6 hours of chipping, chiseling (with a paint scraper, mind you. I don't have a chisel) bleeding, cursing and flailing about in a chubby hulk rage. I managed to remove the plywood. The last and most effective 2 hours were spent "whittling" the wood away with a boxcutter. seriously, I needed to bust out some whitt'lin skills on this'n.

I dont have any pics of the aftermath, sorry. once I inserted the leg blocks and spline into the back of the table, It really just looked like the edge of a table without a veneer.

With a little Gorilla glue I reattached the original veneer strips to the back and sides of both tables. Now they pretty much look like smaller versions of themselves. Yay me.


Next: Painting!

New Project : Workstation Reconstruction

I set up my home office in the house quickly when we moved in a year ago, promising myself that this setup was only temporary, that a better configuration will be forthcoming.

A year later, and my home office is no different than it was. Worse even, as I had disassembled my art table to make more room (and it was broken and terrible to use).

Here's a couple pics of what it's like. transformation pics to follow as I complete them. They will consist mostly of building an additional bookshelf, the repositioning of the furniture and reconstructing the desk.

Platform Bed COMPLETE

Shelf cubbies; Fabric backed, lit, assembled, and awesome. 

 

Final assembly time. some things worked really well; some did not. Jenn and I did a test run of the outer frame, and a few problems showed up immediately.


To start with, the hinges were a great idea, but the ones I bought didn't work at all. as soon as any force was applied to them, they tore away from the wood of the shelves. I'm not sure if it was the screws, or the location on the shelf, or what. I currently have the hinges replaced with traditional L-braces, but I will soon be replacing those with hinges again, as right now the bed is much too large to move around the room much less out of it for any reason.

The rope lighting is great, but running the lights along the bottom of the shelf cubbies limited their ability to illuminate the contents, so I took Jenn's advice and switched it to run along the tops of the cubbies. Since I wanted to avoid drilling new holes, I needed to flip the shelves and reconnect them. This turned out to be a huge undertaking, eating up nearly an entire weekend. If you remember, two of the shelves have a different color on the bottom than the top, and so the dividing shelves in them need to be disassembled and flipped, rather than the whole unit.


Unfortunately doing this to 2 units and not the whole outer frame meant that half of the shelves ran in a clockwise spiral and the other half ran anti-clockwise.  In the end I had to disassemble nearly the entire outer frame into its fundamental components and reassemble it. All to get the rope lighting to run along the top without drilling new holes.

Adding to the mess was the fact that I flat out forgot during most of this that we had purchased a pair of shelf add-ons do put a door on a couple of the cubby holes. this required assembling each add-on, finding a place for them to go, and drilling the appropriate holes.

Jenn came home from work and helped in the final few steps. We finished the outer frame, attached the braces, added the inner frame, laid down the MDF slats, and threw on the new mattress. Its MUCH bigger than the original plan for a platform bed, but its a sweet bed and it has tons of storage. And I built it by hand, so there's that. It fills up the room, but it's totally worth it.

Now there are a few things I'd like to add to it, such as wrapping canvas around the slats under the mattress to make them easier to remove all at once when accessing the storage underneath, and of course adding heavier duty hinges, but this bed is fully functioning and I call this project COMPLETE!

Update : Summer Sarong COMPLETE

So the sarongs are completely finished. They were a lot of fun to do, and super easy. I made it more of a challenge by trying to make 4 different sarongs. Since each of the four fabrics were identical in height and length, That meant getting more creative.

As I did research on the types of sarongs, I noticed that they came primarily in two styles; square and tube. Both were ice and both had their own multitude of tying styles.

As I measured the fabric, I worried that I wouldn't like the length. They were just long enough to come down to my ankles before tying, and many tying styles required rolling the fabric up, which would ride the bottom hem up to my mid-calf. The fabric was long enough to cut in half cross-wise and sew the long ends together. This would make a much taller sarong, but narrower.

Considering this I decided to make a Mendel matrix.

Along the top ; long and short cut.
Along the side ; Tube and square.

Each cell would represent a fabric pattern.

Tall / Square : Geisha

This one is nice, but the narrowness of it makes me kind of nervous about it opening up. I'm probably being paranoid about it. Jenn loves this geisha pattern.

Tall / Tube : Koi scales

This one is my favorite pattern. The scales are an awesome color and its not as busy as the dragon print. The length is great for roll-up tying styles. This is the one sarong I have least needed to adjust / retie.

Short / Square : Herons
I like this pattern. It reminds me of the Wheel of Time when I wear it. But most things with herons do that, because I'm an unrepentant nerd. This sarong tends to ride up the most, and its almost like wearing unbifurcated shorts. It's also the one I have to adjust / retie the most often.

Short / Tube : Dragons
This pattern was so insane I had to make something out of it. It's pure awesome, like a shark and he-man high-fiving during a skydive. The tube style allows more varied tying styles, and it lets me do the balinese knot, which I'm learning is often my favorite.

So with the final stitch and this post, this project is successfully COMPLETED!