The Desk

The new desk

The storage cabinet closed. Inside is the printer, modem and power strip

The inside of the storage cabinet

Note the arrangement for holding the various cables in place under the desktop. They are easily disengaged if need be.

Detail from one of the cabinet side panels

The office desk is nearly done. We are waiting on a little more hardware and there are a couple of tweaks here and there, but the big stuff is done and in place. I used cherry wood throughout.

You might recall from a previous post that Nancy and I came up with the design by creating a mock-up to test out the arrangement. From there I translated that into a plan for two cabinet bases, a large desk top and a "wing" that slots into the desk and provides good work space and views for Nance, who spends lots of time working at this desk. She's managed with some pretty rudimentary set-ups in the past, so its nice to create something that sets her up well.

The right hand cabinet is a conventional set of drawers; the top one is a simple drawer and the bottom one is a file cabinet sized arrangement.

The left hand cabinet looks like a matching cabinet with drawers but in fact serves as storage for the printer, the power strip, and the modem. The side of the cabinet opens to reveal the stuff inside but doesn't look like a door.

The wing is designed to easily come off so that we can have space to set up a bed in the office when we want to make it into a guest room.

When I was working out the plan, Nancy challenged me to come up with something clever for sides of the cabinets and I was sort of stumped. After tossing around some ideas I decided to stamp the side panels with letters and numbers--the idea being that desks, cabinets, printers and the like are pretty much about generating and holding letters and numbers. The result is subtle, but I'm pleased with how it came out.

A bonus is the keyboard drawer which I picked up the at the state of Vermont salvage store in Waterbury. It is versatile, easy to use, and very solid; a new version of this mechanism would cost over $100. It was a good catch at $10.

When the drawer slides arrive I will build a slide out base for the printer so it'll be easy to load up paper. The drawer pulls will be in that same order and installing those will round off this part of the project. Yet to come are an upper shelving unit along the back of the desk for storage and such. That'll be easy compared to the desk and cabinets.

Office Desk

Nancy at work. I was concerned the L would impede the passageway to the basement stairs, but its fine

The view outside is important and this arrangement works really well. Our bird feeder is outside the window on the right allowing for an easy glance over the computer

Sketches of the desk. We'll store the printer under the desk in a faux cabinet

We've been working on making the office space functional. For many months the computer has been set up on a little 3' x 3' table and we decided we needed to design a desk that would work well in the room.

This is Nancy's primary work space and she has a few priorities that we've been considering for a long time but never really figured out satisfactorily. Going way back to our original house plans we knew we didn't really know how we were going to make the space work, but we just figured we'd figure it out.

Nancy's priorities:

-View: In the yurt, she could glance just to her right and see the birds on the quince bush.

-Not having the desk run in front of the window(s)

-Proper storage and being able to spread out her work as needed

Beyond these requirements we want the room to still be useable as a secondary guest room when needed.

I spent some time playing with different arrangements and didn't really come up with anything satisfactory. As we looked at my sketches, Nancy suggested having the desk extend in an L out into the middle of the room. For me this seemed like putting a big hook in the way of the flow walking from the upstairs to the basement (something I do multiple times a day), but we decided to mock it up and to our satisfaction found that it met all our requirements. Nancy's been working on the mock-up since. Meanwhile I've been planing out the real thing and am just starting on building the desk now.

Our plan is for the wing of the desk that extends out into the room to be easily removeable. This will open up the floor space for a futon should we need to set up the room for sleeping.

Cabinets and Trim

Adam at work on the casing around the pocket doors

Lining up the forstner bit with the pilot hole

Drilling the mounting hole

Doors in place. Notice the red line at the top -- I've yet to adjust these doors so they all line up level

Here I'm using the laser to sight the height line for the drawer slides, one of which is mounted on the left

I've been working on the cabinets, specifically the doors and the drawers. Having never before built cabinetry in any real way I've felt trepidatious at some of the critical junctures. One of those junctures is marking, drilling, and mounting the doors. I spent a good bit of effort to make a couple of jigs that allowed me to make accurate marks for drilling. I tested one door before deciding that my jig was going to work and then after it worked fine went ahead and did the rest. The doors are all mounted with what are known as "European" hinges. They are quite common these days, but used to be somewhat exotic. The beauty of them is that they allow for adjustments in three directions (or more on some models), so if your doors are not all quite straight or a little off center or whatever, you have some room to correct.

I also mounted the slides for all the drawers and that went fine too. Actually, what made it really easy was Adam's laser level. I set it up, found my height and the laser shone its horizontal beam into all the bays of the cabinets and I was able to mark all my drawer heights super accurately. The alternative would have been cumbersome and of dubious accuracy. Hooray for laser levels!

Tomorrow I'll mount the drawers and then make the drawer fronts and finish the cabinet face frame inbetween the doors and drawer fronts. When I get to that point I'm basically done with the major work on the cabinets and will then been getting ready to build the maple countertops.

Working alongside me this week, Adam has been building the framed door passages at both the exit doors and between the office and living space, which is the wall that houses the pocket doors. He's done some nice work and these things all look like pieces of furniture. He'll probably have all the doors trimmed out tomorrow and then be on to running the baseboard that connects it all together.

Snowy days to build walls

Last week saw a welcome snowstorm after a full two months of no snow whatsoever. It was fun to see the snow pile up on the roof and then slide down in a big wuuuummmphff around the house.

While the snow was coming down I completed the wall that houses the pocket doors. This wall defines the office space and, despite our worries that the space would be compromised with a stair hatch to the basement, it feels like its going to work out pretty well. The doors are a good way to separate the living room area from the office area. I finished off the office space by building a little triangular hanging wall that encloses the upper part of the stairs.

That brought me to finishing the bathroom/washing machine/closet configuration on the second floor. I've now reconfigured that little are three times and I think we're good at this point. Here's the history:
1.The first iteration was simply an end wall with a doorway in it. As described in the last post, we decided that moving the door around the corner would be a better use of the space. There is a picture of this configuration in the Feb. 18th posting.
2. The second arrangement had the door around the corner with a closet adjacent to the end wall to house the washing machine. This is what is seen in the fourth photo.
3. We decided we didn't like how far out the closet came so we decided that we could steal some space from within the bathroom to house the washing machine and use the our nice looking existing armoire as a built-in in place of a enclosed closet. Photo number five.

We're going to stick with this layout for the time being.

Pocket Door Wall

Today involved building the wall between the living room area and the office space. This is a wall with double pocket doors. The doors will roll into the wall to create a wide pass-through opening between the rooms. Our goal here is to have the option of privacy while also being able to keep the office space open and accessible to the larger living space.

The wall took a little planning and then some careful work to build. It is essentially two parallel walls that are joined at the top and then fixed to the floor but have no connection inbetween, where the door passes through.

With the warm temperatures outside I barely needed the woodstove today and by the afternoon it was pretty warm.

I left the space over the pocket door wall open in case we decide we want to install some sort of transom lights overhead, as we are planning to do over the bathroom doorway. The office and bathroom wall frame the stairway on either side and are in the same plain, so there is a logic to creating a similar look across the whole wall surface.

Wiring continues

I've spent the last couple days continuing the wiring. It's going pretty smoothly, with a question here and there for Felton to make sure I've got the right idea. Its taking me longer then I would have guessed once I got started, but I think I'll have the lion's share in place tomorrow or the next day.

After that I'll probably start in on the basement stairs or the office walls to take up some time before Paul and I take up with the plumbing.

Today I ordered the parts I need to build a set of pocket doors going from the living room to the office. I think it'll be a nice way to have the option of privacy or openness between the two spaces.

On a different front, Nancy and I spent 1 1/2 hours yesterday afternoon at our local appliance and fixture store contemplating washing machines, stoves, dishwashers, toilets, etc... there's a lot to figure out and we are hoping to make a bunch of purchases on March 6th, which is a "tax holiday" here in Vermont. Wish us easy decisions and harmonious discussions!