My desk – the Tabletop

At the end of 2006 I was thinking about buying a new desk. But the crazy thing was, I couldn’t find one. Until I was moving from Düsseldorf to Hamburg in spring 2007, I could not find the one I wanted to have. So, I thought about it and decided to build my own one.

The first idea was to build a workplace for me an my laptop. It took a while until I had the perfect concept. I had the idea to build a space into the desk where I could keep stuff, like my macbook. A simple drawer was too easy. I used the frame from an old clerical desk my dad found and built onto it a table top. I decided to create an open top leaf, which features two holes, one for the power cable and the other for his peripherals that are hidden under the top leaf. I counterbore all the screws which are used to build the desk in order to plug them up and paint them over. I polished and sanded the table, then primed, varnished, and polished again. I repeated this process 2-3 times. I installed a power strip inside the desk that can be turned on and off. The strip is powered by the red power cord that snakes out of the desk. The costs were relatively low, because the frame was free. The wood of the tabletop costs about € 30, then screws, varnish, hinges, power cord, and strip totaled about € 100.

But then the crazy thing just happened. The german blog stylespion asked his followers to contribute to the stylespion flickr-group in order to present the living and furniture ideas of us. After I uploaded pictures of my desk to my flickr account, Stylespion blogged about my desk. And after a short while expil.de (a german page about do-it-yourself ideas and the instructions) also blogged about my construction.

I came up with the idea to contribute my desk to some do-it-yourself or crafting groups at flickr and after some time the american blog unplggd.com (a page of apartment therapy) Asked me to write a little report about how i built the desk, so they could blog about it. My desk, I called “tabletop”, also got published at designspotter, lilagrün.de, stylinrooms, and Marke Eigenbau .

I want to say THANK YOU for all the positive responses. It makes me really happy to see how much you like the desk I builded. It was tough but the work was totally worth it!

Update:

Here is a current picture of my desk: