I built a huge work/home desk on a budget using only tools and wood I could get from a crap local hardware store.

I just bought a new house and have a much bigger office than I used to. The gap I have is about 3.5m long, and I wanted to build a desk which would give me enough space to have both a work and a play environment in this room. I shopped around for a long time and found that my only options were to pay someone to build a bespoke desk for me, or to get dirty and do it myself. This is my story of how I built the above desk from parts anyone should be able to get hold of (mostly construction grade materials), for a lot less than it would've costed to commission a bespoke one.

My main goals for this project were to create a modular design which could be applied en-mass to a variety of uses (I plan to make a workbench for the garage using the same method, as well as a dining table using a variation of the design and hardwood instead of pine). The desk splits in half and could easily be converted into 2 smaller desks if I were to move again.

Obligatory finished picture first. Excuse the mountain of crap in the front left corner, that's leftover cables and brackets that the three monitors on the right are supposed to sit on. I picked up a 3 monitor bracket for them instead. The monitors are all 27", which might give you a feel for the scale of this venture. The desk is 3.2m long. You didn't ask but I don't care, the keyboards are a KBC Poker III and an OLKB Preonic. I like keyboards and have far too many of them.

All in, I spent about £250 building this project including the cost of wood, tools (an orbital sander in there, too), screws, bolts, glue, etc. If I did it again, without having to buy the tools or wood glue, a second one would probably cost me about £120. A lot of the money was spent on tools and mistakes.

FP Edit: Thanks for popping my cherry folks! No newds thanks, just go out, do something creative, and bring it home to share!

The shopping list... I bought a pack of six 2x2 (2.4m long), six 2x4 (2.4m long), and 2 packs of 5 planks of pine floorboards (2.4m long). I had the fairly common problem of not being able to fit anything longer than 2.4m in my car, so the design had to be a bit... elegant. Note that I did not "design" this thing. I sat in KFC with my old man, talked him through what I'd planned in my head and he confirmed that structurally, it should be sturdy as anything else I've ever built (I've built a lot of crap in my time and most of it falls over after a week). We sketched on KFC napkins and eventually approximated this much wood to buy.

First job, cut the 2x4 into managable sizes for the legs and lengths. The long planks are 1.6m, the side ones are about 740mm giving me about 820mm depth total in the desk. The legs are some height that matched my old desk since that was a perfect height for me. Can't remember the number. This is very individual and if this were a guide, I'd say to make them about 1.4m long. You'll be able to cut them down once you've finished.

The middle ones are legs, just I put them that way around so they fit better. As you can see, the design is played very much by ear... I did some stuff, it looked about acceptable so I did the next bit of stuff.

I cut some 2x2 to fit into the gap between the legs on each of the long 2x4s, this will take the weight of the desk surface (made from the floorboards). The glue ended up being a bit useless since the 2x2 was warped to hell. It did the job though, and the 5 screws used in each one are actually decking screws. I didn't use more through fear of splitting the wood, and I drilled pilot holes in the 2x2 since it was obviously pretty trash tier. I've never used wood glue before so please don't shout at me if this isn't how you're supposed to use it.

I used some nice long coach bolts to secure the legs onto the front and back planks. These things are m8 100mm, I also have some 150mm for the far end because the 2x4 is the other way around. You'll see why soon.

Bolted the lot together, and connected the end piece to make it all stand freely. This thing is very not square at the minute. I'll do some stuff to correct that soon, but it's fine for now since the 90 degree angles are both secured by cheap nasty bendy stainless things anyway.

See... Cheap nasty bendy stainless things. They bend like crazy and are actually at about 70 degrees in the box. I had to bend them square and take some measurements before adding some supports to try square the whole thing off.

The two things are about the same size. At this point, I could see the finished product much more clearly. I was so happy I'd finally finished the structure of the thing, even though it only took me about 3 hours so far.

It was very wobbly, so as per the plan I improvised another couple of supports. This didn't turn out to be enough so I later added even more support to this in the form of the trusty triangle, but didn't get any good pics of that. I'll point it out later on though.

Tested some wood stain, I like this. It's Ronseal "antique pine". I'm guessing all of this wood is some kind of pine, maybe norwegian spruce which is fairly common. It's all C16 graded kiln dried stuff. Sturdy enough for my purposes. Anyway, I went with this since it was the lightest available, and I liked how it looked like that Instagram "pop" filter thing.

I also added a bracket in the middle, but high enough up that you won't really see it unless you go looking for it. You can see I only have 1 coach bolt in each leg, too. This was by design, so I can wobble the legs once it's in my study and make it square before the final fitting together of the 2 halves. If I'd secured it with 2 bolts, for sure the legs would end up with a gap between them which would be hideous. I'm bad at measuring, but good at preparing to not have to measure. Cut me some slack twice, and measure it once.

This is how I joined the legs of the two halves together. 100mm m8 coach bolts. I love the way these remind me of the kinda jungle jims I used to play on as a kid, really sits well in my mind. Plus, I've seen these things soaked in the wood stain before and they look strangely pleasing to the eye. They get some odd marbled brass effect. I love it.

Started to cut the planks from the floorboards, as you can see I actually did this before I connected the legs together. Mistake? Possibly. It worked out in the end though.

Cutting some more planks. You can see the label and probably read the barcode on these things, they are cheapest of the cheap. All of them are pretty bowed and I wouldn't really expect them to fit this purpose very well, but they kinda do.

Once all the planks are cut I secured them with some panel pins and called on my resident decorator to apply some lacquer. She wasn't excited by the prospect of ruining clothes with lacquer, so y'know, forgive the slightly unprofessional outfit. Got the job done though, and we had fun.

You can actually see in this picture, I added a triangle to the end legs. Well spotted. These were added immediately before the varnish was applied.

I missed another step here. I sanded all of the planks using some fine grit (I think 80 but I have no idea how sandpaper is graded, it was really fine stuff) sanding pad (is that the right word? Probably not) on my new Random Orbital Sander. It did the trick perfectly - counteracted some of the bowing and helped me to level the planks a bit. A bit of bowing is fine since I'll be putting stuff on the desk, but there was way too much bowing before I sanded. Stuff would roll down the bowed wood and into the gaps. I can always replace this later on with some plywood if the planks bow or move about too much, but I really liked the idea of the planks. It resonates childhood memories of old fashioned furniture.

First coat of stain going on, it's looking pretty good. I like the way that the stain makes all the knots pop. It might be a bit much for some, but I'm about to put 2 huge mouse mats on this thing so I don't really mind at all.

Second coat being applied, it's all looking a bit orange. That's partially because of the stain but also largely because of the sunset. It's getting to that time of year where we have 3 hour sunsets in bright red. At this point all that's left is to scroll back to the top and remember what it looked like once it was finished.

Thanks for reading, hope ya'll enjoyed!