Receptionist Desk Part II - Milling the rough lumber

It has been awhile since I've done a post. I had to work a significant amount of overtime at work and the amount of time I had available to putter out in the garage was significantly reduced. A couple of weeks ago, my sons and I started sorting through our stock pile of wood. Since the desk has a great deal of narrow and reasonably short pieces we decided to begin by utilizing some of the less desireable boards in the pile. By desireable I mean that these pieces had a lot of defects that would prevent longer and wider pieces from being utilized but would yield a good number of decent pieces for the rails and stiles required to build this desk.

We spent awhile sorting through the boards and estimating the various cuts to try and see what we can come up with. We chose a couple of really clear boards for the counter top around the top and a couple of boards that looked really clean for the desktop.

Over the past couple of Saturdays we've been working through the cut list and jointing and planing the boards required leaving them slightly oversized in all 3 dimensions to allow for some tension release. Tonight Johannes and I finished cutting them to width and thickness. I had hoped to use 7/8" thick material but a few stubborn boards would not cleanup until we reached 3/4". There are quite a few boards that are showing significant rayflake so the desk should really turn out very nicely.

We also began working on the desktop. We began with 4 boards approximately 9" to 9.5" in width. After jointing and trimming the outside edges and removing most of the sapwood and as many defects as possible, we were left with a 33" wide top. The final top is supposed to be about 32" in width. We will lose a bit more as we cut the glue joints. So the final dimension will probably be reduced to closer to the final dimension of 32".

The hardest part about working with rough lumber is that there are times that you can't really see all the defects until after you begin to plane the lumber. I chose two boards that had clearly come from the same tree in hopes that they would match up in color and characteristics. The tree must have had a mineral streak or discoloration in the wood. I wound up with a bookmatched dark streak in two of the boards. You can see the defect in the upper right of the image. The other dark areas especially in the foreground of the image are the result of the beginning of a crotch in the tree. There are a couple of other defects, one knot near the top center of the image and one in the foreground left. The foreground left will be removed when we trim the top to length (its a few inches over length right now). The other is removeable only if I narrow the desktop by an extra inch. The other option is to leave it, perhaps fill it with epoxy to level it to the desktop. I've done this a few times - once on my daughter's pencil post bed and again on the sofa.

Well that's it for tonight.

Receptionist Desk - Intro

A month or so a friend of mine asked me if I could make her a new desk for her receptionist, unfortunately she also didn't have a real budget for it. I agreed to do it, provided they covered the cost of materials to a maximum of ~$400.00. The desk will be a bit different then a normal desk. It needs to have a wrap-around shelf/ledge at standing height in order for clients to fill in paperwork while protecting the receptionist's monitor and providing at least some level of privacy for the receptionist.

I was given free-reign on coming up with a design. Despite the fact that this will largely be a voluntary effort in terms of my time, I didn't just want to slap together a plywood box and call it done. I visited the office about a month or so ago, but their wasn't much in terms of inspirational furniture in it - the current furniture is a rather hodge-podge collection of mismatched chairs, and a small sofa that has seen its better days. Even the inner office lacked any cohesive furniture style. There was however, at least one thing that did inspire me. The building the office is in is very old and part of the historic downtown Palmyra and across from the old courthouse. The interior design of the building retains some of the historic characteristics in the woodwork on the inside. There were one or two old pieces of furniture - a desk/table in the craftsman style as well.

The design had to incorporate both a desk and the wrap around shelf. So I took my inspiration from a traditional rolltop desk. This provides both the main desk as well as the additional height at the front of the desk on top which a shelf could be added. By using a frame and panel design should help to save some wood and give a more "craftsman" look to the desk. The shelf/ledge will project 7" in front of the desk, and 4" behind with ~1" over the front panel for a total of ~12 inches of usable room. The wrap around will only extend about 20-24" from the front of the main ledge. This allows the ability to use the traditional side panel design of the rolltop desk. The desk needs a single pullout keyboard drawer, though I'm undecided if I will attempt to put additional drawers down the left side in order to add some additional mass to the desk to counterbalance the ledge on the front (in case something heavy is placed on it).

I didn't have time to draw up a complete dimensioned drawing, however I'm going to base most of the design off some drawing for a rolltop desk that appeared in Fine Woodworking magazine a few years ago - "Building a Roll-Top Desk" by Kenneth Baumert. However I don't plan on making it modular nor do I plan on using raised panels. I'll be sticking to a more traditional mission/craftsman style.

Front View

Side View

Top View

Unfortunately I was using an antiquated technique - pencil and paper to sketch the desk using a 1/8" scale. For some reason my old scanner doesn't seem to like pencil drawings. The exact sizing of the rails and styles at least in the side view aren't accurate as I still have a few things to figure out.

I'm planning on building the desk out of oak boards that I currently have on hand out in the shop. I'm thinking of finishing it using the same recipe as I used on our mission style sofa and chairs: analine dye, oil stain, shellac and finally polyurethane to protect the finish.

My original idea to save time and money was to put a  single drawer that extends the full width of the desk that would be attached to two heavy duty drawer slides - which is the way the receptionists current desk is built. I'd like to build in a standard set of drawers on the left and have the keyboard drawer extending the rest of the way to the right. I'll have to give it more thought - the downside is it would add another $30-$40 to the hardware part of the budget.

I had hoped to build it over the course of June after my current work deadlines have been met. Unfortunately my current work project has turned into a tortorous nightmare requiring a ton of overtime. So we'll see how far I can get over the rest of the month. There are times that I just need to get away from the computer and get a bit of physical excercise.

Pencil Post Bed - Completed

Between working a ton of overtime and entertaining my parents for a week and finally trying to recover from a case of bronchitis, I haven't had a chance to post a picture of the completed bed. The following picture is the bed as we set it up in my daughter's room a week and a half ago. I was in a bit of a rush trying to get it together and ready as it was already getting fairly late in the evening so unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the assembly of the angle iron onto the rails or any of the setup. Just one shot before we tossed on the mattress. You can see all the poplar slats, they are spaced about a 1/2" apart. The bed is rock solid. The mattress comes up just even with the bottom of the headboard. My wife is still working on the quilt, perhaps when she gets that done I'll take a picture of the bed with it and post it.