Home Project: Shelf as Workstation

Monday, September 1st, 2008

It’s Labor Day weekend, and that means it’s time for some house work. This weekend, I focused on my quasi home office room. I got wood flooring and paint, which I’ll use later. For today, I upgraded my workspace.

Here’s what it looked like before

I got this desk probably a decade ago and used it for writing/drawing in addition to computer work. Now that I’ve got my own home and considerably more desk space elsewhere, I don’t need all this desk real estate anymore. So, I set out to build a shelf after seeing such a set-up on Apartment Therapy.

Naturally, I set out for IKEA when I decided to build a desk/shelf hybrid. And naturally, it didn’t cost me much. I got the shelf, brackets, slide-out keyboard tray, and a cable organizer, and got to work.

Some drums helped hold it up while I installed it in the wall. Very helpful drums, they are! The coolest part of this shelf stems from a problem I had: I didn’t realize until after I’d purchased all the materials and unpacked them that the slide-out keyboard tray was much too deep for the shelf.

I fixed that problem like so: I drilled holes into the wall so that the slide-out keyboard tray slides into the wall.

What it looks like now….

I haven’t hooked up the computer and routed everything neatly through the cable organizer just yet, but it’s looking good already. The massively increased space from using this little shelf as a workstation allows me to pull my keyboard in closer, and much more room for my drums, making it this much easier to turn my workstation into a quasi recording studio.

More photos to come on my flickr photostream.