kebby desk – the story of custom desk
January 25, 2010
The time was right for my friend to treat himself to a new desk. He deserved it: moving to a new company meant a salary increase, as well as a move to a new apartment. This was also a chance to finally have a desk at a comfortable height. As a 6’4″ computer programmer, he had suffered plenty of hours with his legs crunched under low tables. Besides height, his only request was an interesting, perhaps diagonal, leg structure.
Above you see a couple drafts before we settled on the final design. When we were almost there, I knew this design was going to challenge my allegiance to salvaged materials, but Building REsource came through, and I found two full-dimension 1×12, fir shelf boards with really nice straight grain. I dimensioned the sketches for fabrication, talked a welder into taking on the unorthodox task of fabricating steel inserts to would allow our diagonal leg system to support weight, and got to work cleaning up our wood… but not too much.
Rather than filling pores and layering on finish coats, we decided to accentuate the bumps and bruises of the salvaged stock with a dark stain and wax finish. The final product works nicely with the dark casework his apartment. With one more happy programmer, San Francisco is officially a better place.
