The Office. Part 9 - Finally Finished

Well, this news is a couple of weeks old now. First I had to wait until our bi-weekly visit of our (cough) cleaner before the office was suitably photogenic and it's taken me another week to find time to blog about it...

Anyway, the office has been without drawers ever since Easter when we moved in. Finally, after a quick session with "partner in crimes" table saw and a bit of routing, sanding and varnishing I was able to build the drawers. It took a little bit of fiddling to get them to fit. I can't complain with the result though.

The Office. Part 8 - Moving In

I was at home, and the Misses was in Bergen during easter. When she got back she had the surprise of finding the office ready to move into. The long weekend was 3 days of hard work, but since I left for Finland on Monday afternoon and I won't be back for a couple of weeks, I wanted it to be ready for use in Mrs VLs studies.

I have to say, I'm very satisfied, almost proud and I was dissapointed not to be present at the unveiling to my dear wife. It's taken way longer than the blog posts suggest and it's still not finished, but it's useable and I hope that Mr's VLs study experience is enhanced from now on

I hope the pictures speak for themselves, all that remains are the drawers and the permanent phone/adsl connection (hence the extension lead).

The Office. Part 7 - Round, A new challenge

Both the legs for the end of the desk and the supports for the top shelves are 43mm round posts. This provided a new challenge, as you can see from the photo's, in my opinion, I rose to the challenge.

The Office. Part 6 - The first trial build

After the complexities of the drawer unit, constructing the rear part of the frame and the less visible legs was pretty simple. By now I had enough bits to start trying it all together, the living room turned into a construction zone and Mrs VL, seeing the progress being very tolerant.... As you can see, it was starting to look promising.

The Office. Part 5 - Ikea, eat your heart out.

The evening that I built the carcass for the drawers left me feeling quite satisfied. I didn't really have a plan about how this was going to fix together, all I had was the 2 sides and the base cut to size. Flat pack, you could call it.

After studying the problem and the drawer sides/runners that I had bought on a recent visit to Kaunas in Lithania, I came up with a plan. Some time with the router and a tenon saw later and, as you can see, hey presto, flat pack, glue and some assembly required, but no bits missing....









What's more all the bits for this came out of a single 2m x 0.6m sheet, and nothing else. I think this was the point at which I really started to believe that the office could not just be a reality but something really quite special.

The Office. Part 4 - There's always a catch.

Obviously, whilst going to all the effort of building a new office, there's no point in putting it in the same old poorly decorated room. When first spending time and money on painting the walls and wood work, it seemed a shame to keep the same old carpet, which was a little past it's prime.

Carpets and cats don't go so it was decided to sand the wooden floor down and apply some new coats of varnish.

It all sounded simple, but as those of you who have dealed with previously varnished floors will know, it wasn't. Mrs VL started off with the belt sander, which simply melted the old varnish and made even more mess. Next step was to rope in a poor unsuspecting visitor (the cat's foster mum in this instance), adourn chemical resistant poly bags and attack the floor with paint remover,


(Cutting edge reporting this, one can't begin to imagine how much trouble I'll get in for posting this picture...)

Success was little more than partial. Weeks later and after more chemicals, many worn out sand sheets for both the round and belt sander and with much frustration the floor was finally ready for a new coating.

Here's Mrs VL half way through the first of many coats. You can also see the new colour scheme, freshly applied.

The Office. Part 3 - The lower book shelf.

I started constuction with the easiest bit, the lower part of the bookshelf which also makes up part of the support for the desk itself.

After some fussing about with my router gig to get the correct width for the mortices that support the end of each shelf, it all came together very well, and is good and solid.

Here is the result.

The Office. Part 2 - Cutting Out

After some careful calculations and thought we purchased the required boards and planks for the office project, loaded them up in the Landrover and headed over to my partner in crime for a day of projecteering in his basement, followed by some fine food and a little competitive music identification...

When we were done with building and testing a "single phase to three phase rotary convertor",



I was very grateful for assistance with cutting the pieces for the shelving and more importantly the complicated curves of the desk top. This we did in the sober light of the next day, not all that early mind, it took our heads a little while to cope with power tools!

Partner in Crime, did a great job. After printing out the curves in full scale,



he cut out with a jigsaw, tidied up with a belt sander



and rounded of the edges with a router.



I probably could of done it myself, but as he's got twice as much equipment and twice as much experience, my result would have been half as good... Many thanks, partner in crime...

The Office.

I have a well founded theory that one project frequently leads to another.

If one considers Mrs VL's recently begun Masters Degree from the Royal Veterinary College to be a project then there is yet another data point to confirm my theory.

Those of you who have loved ones or relatives in any medical profession will know that these professions come with a huge amount of literature (which also tends to be expensive). Also, unlike us engineers, who shove our books in the loft after uni and never look at them again, this literature is often required for reference. A distance learning Masters in "Veterinary epidemiology and Public health" involves another literal shed load.

This storage issue, combined with the fact that to successfully study one requires a comfortable, pleasant and spacious office facility, has brought forward our plans to build a new office.

Originally we had designs to turn the smallest of our bedrooms into a compact but functional office. As this room seems to have been taken over by the cats and would not provide enough space for both of us at the same time (one studying and one on the computer), we have chosen to improve our existing office/guest room.

A quick session with a tape measure, a couple of "thinking caps" and an Ikea catalog, helped us to find out that as ever, the ideal solution wouldn't come in a box and DIY was the best value for money and design effective solution.

This all started before the fateful ski holiday and construction is now well under way, you'll have to wait for more details of that though, first a sneak preview of the seamless combined application of both basic and highly advanced design methods.