Project Information
Now that we have two kids, my wife opted to start working from home rather than going into the office - and so she needed a new work desk. I offered to build her a maple desk, as part of my plan to start replacing all of the crappy particle board furniture in our house with nice, hand made hardwood pieces.
The majority of the desk is curly maple; the face frames are hard maple and the drawers are Baltic birch ply (and the temporary backer board is an MDF panel with hardwood frame), but all big, flat visible surfaces are curly maple. I box jointed the drawers with the Porter-Cable dovetail/box-joint jig (originally I was going to half-blind dovetail them, but decided to use box joints when I realized my dovetail template was a little bent).
Other than that, it was pretty straightforward frame and panel construction for the cabinets. I scavenged the drawer slides from an Ikea dresser we tore down a few years ago. They were by far the highest quality part of that dresser - metal glides with smooth nylon rollers. Learning to install them was an… experience.
The finish (currently) is two coats of Transtint dye (first coat sanded back to pop the curl) and three to five coats of glossy Arm-R-Seal (the desktop has five coats, the rest has three).
There are a few things that eat at me (one drawer is a little sticky and the cabinet door is not quite square), but nothing that would prevent me from putting this into use right away. I can always fix those little things later if they really turn out to be a big deal.
The majority of the desk is curly maple; the face frames are hard maple and the drawers are Baltic birch ply (and the temporary backer board is an MDF panel with hardwood frame), but all big, flat visible surfaces are curly maple. I box jointed the drawers with the Porter-Cable dovetail/box-joint jig (originally I was going to half-blind dovetail them, but decided to use box joints when I realized my dovetail template was a little bent).
Other than that, it was pretty straightforward frame and panel construction for the cabinets. I scavenged the drawer slides from an Ikea dresser we tore down a few years ago. They were by far the highest quality part of that dresser - metal glides with smooth nylon rollers. Learning to install them was an… experience.
The finish (currently) is two coats of Transtint dye (first coat sanded back to pop the curl) and three to five coats of glossy Arm-R-Seal (the desktop has five coats, the rest has three).
There are a few things that eat at me (one drawer is a little sticky and the cabinet door is not quite square), but nothing that would prevent me from putting this into use right away. I can always fix those little things later if they really turn out to be a big deal.