Ain't That Strange...

I like to do woodworking.  It's no huge secret.  But I fear I have chosen poorly for my hobby.

With my son and his wife now moved out of our upstairs bedroom, I get to move my work-from-home office from the basement upstairs.  My wife had moved up there several years ago (say 2019) when we were able to use a bonus she received to purchase an adjustable height (motorized) desk, which fit in my son's former bedroom.  His sister moved out, he chose to move into her room because his was on the warmer side of the house (the west), and he had pretty thoroughly filled it up.  

So we took down the old computer desk which I had built for my own use back when we were still living in an apartment, which is essentially a pair of frames connected by some stock 2x4 lumber to provide a working surface of four-by-four feet square.  It works for me.  Or did when I originally built it, and worked well for him for a few years, then when he moved out of the room, we kept the frame, which I reused downstairs when we cleared a spot.

Moving upstairs I was excited about the possibility of building a table to run along side my desk.  When we were in the house, I'd been extremely fortunate to acquire some used office furniture - the desk was an old executive desk with a proper typing table.  The set came with a credenza and a table as well.  I had enough room for the desk, and ended up building a table to sit behind the desk as another workstation.  Which became my primary work surface when I got my first work-from-home position.  That table is the one I'm typing on right now, and is a 2x6 frame that's 36" deep by 48" wide.  Inside the 2x6 frame is a 2x4 support structure for the table surface, which is a piece of 3/4" plywood covered in black vinyl.  It works nicely for a work table.

But I wanted to build a table that was the same height as my desk because, when I was in the office, my computer was in the corner of my cube, with desk space to the left and right of my keyboard.  As I'm right handed, it worked well for me to be able to keep a writing surface and paper to my right, and the computer "Cheated" slightly to the left.  I was hoping to replicate that setup upstairs.

So I designed a nice-looking piece of furniture to be made out of basic construction lumber.  There is a joint in woodworking called the "Castle Joint".  It has a leg with two crossing slots (think a + ) at the top of the leg.  The slots are linked with other pieces of wood which are notched to interlock and fit in the slots, thus making a fairly strong, solid joint.  Coming up with 4 1/2" square posts was cost-prohibitive when I started the planning, but the thought occurred to me that I could use 2x6s cut down to size.  

You see, a 2x6 piece of lumber is actually 1 1/2" thick and 5 1/2" wide.  My plan was to buy four of them, and cut one into 25" lengths, take a 25" length of the end of another one, and then cut the rest into 28 1/2" lengths - a total of 8 of the longer pieces, 4 of the shorter ones.  I would then trim all of them down to 4 1/2" wide and create a sandwich of two longer pieces with a shorter one in the middle.

This was where it got tricky.  I wanted to put the table together without obvious hardware, and came up with the idea of cutting a 1/4" deep channel down the center of each of the longer legs.  In that channel, I'd place screws through the wood, long enough to join all three pieces.  If I used a 3 1/2" wood screw, it would travel through the 1 1/4" remaining in the first leg side, the entire 1 1/2" center piece, and still have 3/4" to go halfway through the other side - and actually end up 1/2" below the surface, because I'd also cut a slot in the surface of that side to drive a screw going the other direction.

To hide these unsightly channels with screws in them, I decided to use some scraps.  You see, most "construction lumber" comes with rounded off edges.  This is likely because they would normally be chipped and dinged while going through the manufacturing process, so to save the lumber from going to waste, they put a 1/4" radius roundover on each edge.  I would take each of the 2x6 leg chunks and remove 1/2" from each side, so each piece of the leg was totally squared off.

My table saw has a 1/8" blade - so any 1/2" slice off the edge of a 2x6 would leave me a slab of wood that is 1 1/2" wide and 3/8" thick.  I could cut the rounded sides off, and still have a 3/4" strip that I could use to fill in the slot down the center of the longer sides of the legs.  So then, thinking of the general esthetics of the thing, I decided that I would plow a 1/4" deep by 3/4" wide groove down the center of each leg face.  That is, I planned to use a router to cut the groove down the best side of the long sides of the legs, so the nicest lumber was face out.  Then I'd assemble the leg sandwich with all three pieces, then I'd flip them on the un-grooved sides and run a groove down the center of that side as well - that way each leg would have a 3/4" wide strip down the center of each leg.

This played into the finishing.  I planned to stain the legs a dark walnut, and I'd tape the slots up so they weren't stained.  I would stain the 3/4" wide strips that would fill the slots with a golden oak, to get a brighter goldish toned strip.  Once all the staining had dried, I'd carefully glue the strips into the slots, so I had dark brown legs with golden stripes up the middle.

The top of the legs (prior to staining, obviously) would have had a second 1 1/2" wide slot cut to cross the top of the leg.  That slot would be 3 1/2" deep.  I'd then take 3 2x4s, cut them to fit under the table top, which I had planned for 78" by 35", and I'd notch them so the longer rails would fit over the top of the end cross braces.  Once I'd gotten them all together and confirmed they were solid, I would drill a 5/16" hole through the top of the leg and the longer braces, and on the inside I'd enlarge the first 1/2" of that hole to 3/8".  I would then pound T-nuts into the larger end of the hole, and run a 4 1/2" x 1/4" bolt through the leg and the brace to hold the braces and the legs together.  I'd then mount some additional bracing under the table top to insure the top was attached to the frame.

The top was going to be the simplest part of the build.  I was going to start with a 3/4" plywood base, using what is known as "sheathing" or CDX grade plywood.  That's the sort that may have football-like "divots" in the surface, where branch "knots" are cut out when they're cutting the thin plys from the tree trunk.  It wouldn't be seen from above, I was looking for strength and stability, which I would top with 3/4" MDO Fiberboard, where the MDO stands for Medium Density.  I prefer fiberboard for a desktop because it is harder and smoother than plywood, and can be waxed to seal the surface so it stays easy to clean.  To hide all of the layers I planned to use strips of poplar cut down to 1 3/4" wide, which would be 1/4" thicker than the table top itself.  I'd miter the corners so you had would running all around the table top.  I would glue and use my pneumatic finish nailer which drives skinny little nails.  The nail holes are nearly invisible if you don't know what to look for, and the table edges would look fine.

The problem is the price of the lumber.  Once again, between inflation and lumber prices in general, I figured it would be less expensive to go to Ikea and buy a slightly smaller table, some 30" wide by 63" long, for $189.99.  Then my wife said I should look around - and while Wayfair was useless and Overstock.com did not return any results when I searched for "computer table 72"" but Amazon was able to pull up a number of tables 63" and under $120.  Strangely, going from 63" to 72" boosted the price by some $100, putting me well over $200.  Go figure.

So it looks likely that my upstairs office will minimally have my current computer desk, slightly modified to permit me to put the monitors just a little further from my face (because the shelves on the desk are some 19" above the desktop, but the monitors on the monitor stands whihc I built to reach the exact height I want bring them to 21" tall, so I need to lift the shelves).  We'll see how long that takes to get done, and then what sort of deal my wife may be able to make to find the table I'm looking for.  And maybe a bookshelf, too.