Printer Stand

When my students moved in a new office about 1 1/2 years ago, I had to find a printer stand to suit their needs. What I had in mind were the following requirements:

1. The stand had to be nice since they just got brand new office furniture
2. The printer should not be too bulky for the medium size printer I bought but not too small either
3. Since there are 13 students in that office, all of which are using the printer, it would be nice to have pockets that fit letter size paper where unpicked printouts can be placed so that you do not end up with a large pile on the printer or printouts all over the place
4. Some kind of storage are would be nice to store spare toner and extra paper.

I spend few hours looking all over the web for a stand that would fit the requirements, just to realize that the search is going nowhere. At the time I was a beginner woodworker (just a couple of projects an no fine furniture) but I figured that I should be able to design and build the “ideal” printer stand. The restrictions I had with respect to materials were:

1. Buy materials only from a big home center since I can get reimbursed for the materials from grants or department money only under these conditions.
2. Keep the price reasonable (below few hundreds) otherwise things could get problematic. It is fine to spend a lot more money for furniture but not for “raw” materials.

Because of the two reasons above, I decided to build the printer stand from birch plywood for the case, some oak for the top part and 1/4” oak plywood for the door and the printout pockets.
The picture is the final result of this effort. The piece is finished with Danish Oil (watco I think).
The student like it a lot and those pockets sure come in handy (some of them do not pick up the printouts for weeks).

-- -- Alin Dobra, Gainesville, Florida