opa wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2024 9:33 am
Pardon my French, but why the fuck is it so hard to find a decent computer desk these days?
YES!
This has been my findings as well. Many years ago, back when I was in high school in fact, I bought a shitty computer desk from K-Mart. Although it was cheap to begin with, it was also beat up. I had to make a few repairs to it over the years. It was also inadequate for my needs. And also, why do cheap computer desks always have to be like kind of abstract? Why can't they make something that resembles a traditional desk, even if it's MDF?
Anyway, yeah, I would look for a replacement desk from time to time and get fed up after many hours of searching became fruitless. I had the same findings as you. Everything was extremely cheap and looked like it would break in no time. And even if I wanted to settle for that, I couldn't find a layout that I could even settle for. And a "real" desk is just too expensive.
So I have two main desktop setups, and I ended up making my own desk for both.
For the basement, I ended up building a desk from scratch. I posted a thread about it
here. It's also the desk you can see in pics I post in my retro PC building threads. In short, I wanted a very large desk that was super sturdy. What I did was take a workbench design and modified the height to work as a desk. There's a link to a YouTube video showing how to make the workbench. Minimal tools are needed. I made this during pan-damn-ic prices, so it really helped that I used some left over flooring for the desktop. But if you got a nice A grade piece of ply, you could easily finish it (poly isn't hard to get a nice finish with if you put in the time). Of course, you would want to cover up the visible layers on the edge of the plywood. That can be done with iron on edge banding, if for some reason you couldn't cover it up with real wood (I don't know your skill level or what tools you have access to). I made my front rail 2x4 so it would allow more leg room. I've thought about it since then, if I turned it flat it would still offer support and give even more leg room. You might even be able to omit the front rail, if you wanted more leg room or to use a keyboard drawer. I think without the front rail, you don't have to worry about 3/4" plywood sagging too much, depending on the length. I made my desk 6' long, and I wanted it to double as a workbench of sorts. But I'm sure if you made it shorter you wouldn't have any sag issues (assuming you're not putting any real weight on it). I mean, 3/4" ply is gonna be more sag resistant than MDF and that's what they make shitty desks out of, so yeah.
Anyway, this design is pretty simple and I think very adaptable to your needs. I didn't care if mine looked rougher, and more workbench-like, since it is located in a basement. If you wanted it to look nicer, you could easily add side and back panels. Your only real limit to how nice it looks is your skill level, how versatile your wood working tool available is, and how much time you want to put into it.
For my main desktop upstairs, I really wanted to build my own desk. But time is the usual constraint. Of course, I would want it to look nicer than a workbench if it's located upstairs. Finally I got sick of having a crappy K-Mart desk and sick of waiting to have the time to build a desk. My resolve was to piece together a desk from various components. Think of it as a modular desk LOL.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C6XSP299/?th=1
Above is a simple cheap desk. MDF on 1" square metal frame. It's cheap, but for it's use I'm OK with it. There's plenty of desks like this one available, different sizes and finishes. This is just the one I went with.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01H6YIH4S/
Above is a bank of drawers. It slides under the desk perfectly. Again, there's so many drawers like these out there to choose from.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07G24QVM6/?th=1
And that's a keyboard drawer that I got. Specifically for this combo of items, this is the largest drawer that fits under the desk minus the width of the drawers.
And since they're all black, I bet the average person wouldn't look twice that it isn't an actual computer desk.
Again, this is a totally modular thing. The bank of drawers can go on either side of the desk. Or not even under the desk, put it next to the desk if you have the room. Omit the keyboard drawer if you don't mind have the keyboard and mouse on top of the desk. While it isn't perfect, it's loads better than the shitty knock-down desk that I had before it. And because I pieced it together, it's the exact layout I wanted instead of settling for some crappy layout.
