The Turquoise Desk

I shared a little sneak peek of my new desk on Friday's post, and I'm excited to show you the finished product today! Yall, I am in love. Parker designed and built it, so I thought it would be only fitting for him to write the post. He halfheartedly agreed to do so ;). Disclaimer, despite his dry sense of humor that comes out towards the beginning of this post, he actually does love me. Well enough of that, here's Parker's story on my new favorite piece of furniture:

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As many of you may know, Chelsea has been working from home for over a year. During this period, she has had the pleasure of using a desk purchased at Target that is approximately the size of a large cafeteria tray. It barely has enough room for her keyboard and monitor, much less a phone and mouse. Obviously I never hear the end of this.

Since I had a little free time between Primary and Intermediate flight training, I "volunteered" to make Chelsea a new desk. We started with very basic design requirements:

1.     Left hand drawers

2.     Large(r) surface

3.     No hutch

Since Kingsville only has one major home improvement store (Lowes), I bought all the supplies from there.

One disappointment from the Lowes in Kingsville was the quality of their cuts. Since my Audi A4 doesn't have much trunk space and my table saw can only do a 24'' cut, I am limited by what I can do at home. I thought the guys at Lowes could help by using their cutting station (this is a normal practice). There was a red flag when it took four guys to operate the cutting station when it should take just one. I decided to add a few inches to each cut so that they couldn't mess anything up too badly (usually cuts are not cut at the right size). But when I got home, I had a different problem: not one rip or cut they had performed was square. All cuts were done at a diagonal! There was a two inch difference between one side of the sheet of plywood and the other!

The pencil line represents a straight cut measured from the factory cut side of the sheet. This is where the saw should have cut the first time!

These poor cuts had two major impacts. First, I would have to shrink the initial design since the plywood was cut too small. Second, none of the plywood was cut square and my table saw was too small to fix the problem. Long story short: the plywood used in the project was not perfectly square and thus the entire project had issues.

The plywood box that holds the drawers. Since this was a little out of whack, the drawers all had sliding issues (originally) and there were noticeable gaps between it and the desk

Coming together

Finished with paint

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I am super pleased with the way it came out. Parker is his own worst critic and doesn't realize how amazing he is at building furniture. I got pretty blessed in the husband department :). The color is something way out of my comfort zone, but I am so glad we chose it. It's called Turquoise Tint from Lowes. The new desk definitely makes work a little more fun!