In our previous posts we covered our major office renovation to get the shell of the room in shape, followed closely by the significant effort to repair the oak floors that were badly damaged through bathroom renovations and neglect over the years. We also showed you the effort we went to that allowed an exposed brick wall to shine, as well as the extensive work we completed on our custom cherry desk. To say this project was "involved" is a pretty significant understatement.

I am getting a little ahead of myself. Before we could claim victory on our room we had a few finishing touches to put in place. 

From time to time (okay, sort of constantly), we get a little ahead of ourselves and do things out of order. This is often due to the desire for progress even when progress is not readily available at the time. When this occurs, we've been known to paint the walls before installing the trim, finish floors before sanding the walls, or any number of other out of order item that requires us to take extra time to resolve the issue. Our office project was no different, as you will see from the various photos. 

Given that we already had much of the room's palette defined by the dark wood of an antique bookcase, the color of the wood floor, and the reds and oranges of the brick wall, we definitely needed a rug before we chose a paint color. I really wanted to choose one that was unique, would play off of the various colors in the room, and most importantly, one that was the right size for our small office. I started to scour eBay for just the right thing, and after a few days of searching, I came across one that might work. A few days after the auction closed we laid the new and cool rug in place. It was quite a bit different than what we had through much of the rest of the house, but it really worked for us in the room. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of the rug with white walls, but here's what we were working with.

Though the color is on the wall in the above photo, we didn't decide on the color until after we had purchased and received the rug. For color selection, to complement the exposed brick, I chose a warm yellow color for the walls, Sherwin Williams' "Toasted Pine Nut." This color did an excellent job in making the room feel very welcoming, and also enhanced the colors in both the floors and the brick wall.

Just prior to painting the walls, we had also worked on the installation and painting of the custom and salvaged window and door casing. We had a bit of trim that matched our home's original trim that Alex rescued from the trash several years earlier. He did his normal routine of paint stripper and elbow grease to get these pieces of trim into shape, then cut and installed them around the window.

Around the doorway we installed some custom milled trim that matched our original trim. We always have about 100'-200' of this custom trim on hand for when we need it on any given project. When we start to get a little low, we order a bit more because we know we'll be using it somewhere. Here's the door casing and jamb prior to painting that wall.

Since the office is small, the door to the office needed to swing out into the hallway. We had thoughts of a pocket door, but that would have meant changing around electrical, and also that we couldn't use a rim lock, neither of which we were interested in at this point in the project. We were lucky to have an original door that was rescued from the trash during a neighbor's renovation (same rescue mission as the trim I mentioned). This door was an identical match to the doors in our home, so it was perfect.

We installed one of the salvaged rim locks that match the other rim locks throughout the house, and used salvaged cast iron lift off hinges that match our other second floor hinges. Everything was really coming together.

I chose a dark bamboo roman shade blind for the small window from Next Day Blinds. Given that this is our office, and we plan on working many long nights in front of the computer, it was important that the blinds could be easily closed. Also, since the room is small and the window is so close to where the desk sits, the shade needed to be completely concealed inside the window frame, otherwise it would have been in the way of the work area.

After our lengthy desk build was complete (if you haven't looked at that process, give it a look, you might enjoy it), we took a step back and were finally able to admire our completed room.

Opposite the desk wall we placed the inspiration for our desk, an antique bookcase we picked up several years earlier. We had been waiting for the right place to use it, and this was perfect.

And since then I've accessorized with various items, including these four prints from the San Francisco Bay that I framed and gave Alex as a gift a few years ago. They represent some of our favorite locations that we visited on our various trips to the west coast.

As you can see in the photo above, the vent grate we used in the office is the same style as what we mentioned earlier this week with the return vent cleaning. This profile is from Reggio Register and we've slowly converted all register covers in the house to this style. I think it's just one of those little details that really put the cherry on top with our lengthy renovation.

Since this room is so small, it's really difficult to capture without using our wide angle lens. Unfortunately, I feel like it distorts the room a bit too much, but it's all we can do to give you a good look at the whole place.

Involved as it may have been, to turn a room from a poorly used bathroom space into a functional and relatively spacious home office felt almost like we had put an addition on our house. Suddenly we had a place where the computer could live that wasn't the same room where a guest could sleep. It was refreshing. 

It's weird to think about the before...

...Given the after.

And how far things came when we started with this...

...And ended with this.

Oh, and the few things we have left? Alex still needs to build a storm window and replace the sash in the window. All in due time. 

So what do you think of our work? Did we make the right choice in grabbing an inefficient piece of our house and turning it into an office? Though it's not big, we love the space. To us, the end result is the perfect size to efficiently work while not taking up too much of the house. 

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This wall was the original back wall of our house when it was built in the 1880s. Here it is before we removed the cracked and completely failed plaster.

When we had completed the extremely filthy dirty task of plaster removal, we had our first look at what would eventually be our desk wall. Overall it looked pretty good and solid. There was the HVAC register in the upper left, a little cracking and settling on the bottom left, and a open spot in chimney that was once home to a stove that is long gone. The chimney is actually cut off just above this wall and doesn't exit through the roof, so this stove has probably been out of service for 100 years or more.

Fast forward a few months from the plaster removal and we were onto the point of shoring up the wall and making it pop. The old mortar was crumbling so badly that we wanted to make sure it was cleaned up before we built our desk. We hired a local mason to repoint the wall and fix the hole in the chimney to get the whole thing back into fighting shape. I had really wanted to do this part of the project myself, but for some reason, I was totally scared. A neighbor recommended a mason that had used on their house, so we invited him over to take a look, he had a reasonable price and could knock it out in two days, and he was familiar with working in mortar of old houses. And with that, our mason got to work and actually made quite short work of the project, one day of chiseling...

...and one day of pointing and repair. 

We felt he was a little too thorough in the work he did and the mortar was actually a bit too far into the brick, so before it fully cured Wendy and I scraped quite a bit of the surface of the mortar back. This gave us the look we were going for and we felt good with the end result. After we allowed the the mortar to cure, we cleaned the wall a few more times for good measure, then Wendy applied a coat of low luster, water based polyurethane to the wall to bring out the various colors. You can see just how much the poly made the reds, oranges, and yellows pop in the brick.

We're absolutely thrilled with how our wall turned out, and we still love it every day we look at it. Since this is an interior wall and there was never any intention for an exposed brick look when the masons were building our house 125 years ago, the bricks are all different colors and finishes. I actually like the way this looks and I think it adds some visual interest to the wall.

If you're thinking about doing an exposed brick wall, I absolutely recommend the use of low luster water based poly. It gives such a nice texture and color to the wall, without making it shiny and super glossy. 

After we wrapped up the work on the wall and put a coat of paint on the plastered walls, our office as a room was "complete." Now it just needed a desk. But oh that desk, that's a whole other story.

In our final installment of this home office post series, we'll review the dramatic before and after photos, complete with a look at the other side of the room, opposite the exposed brick wall. 

So what do you think? Did we make a good choice in exposing this brick, or if it was your home, would you have repaired the plaster? Do you have any exposed brick projects of your own that you've tackled, or an area that you've been dying to get your hands on? We'd love to hear all about it. 

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Though we had completed the walls and ceiling, we had some serious issues facing us with the wood floor. The old oak flooring had been covered for many years by tile applied over plywood. But besides a little water damage in a spot or two, the flooring that was still there looked to be in pretty decent shape. Unfortunately, there was a large strip that had been cut out at some point, and we're still not sure why. You can see the large section of missing flooring on the right side of this photo.

In the above photo, I had already started removing boards near the cut so that we could properly patch the area in a way that would fix the floor without drawing attention to the fact it had been fixed. After all, as bad luck would have it, the strip of flooring was missing across the boards, so this required us to take the time and effort to remove end boards individually in order to weave in new flooring.

To accomplish a seamless patch, I removed boards from the cut back to their natural ends in a more or less random manner. This would allow us to cut individual boards that would go all of the way to the wall, giving the appearance that the floor had never had sections removed. 

Apparently I always wear sandals when working on the house. This is quite poor form.

Sure, anyone you hire to do this would probably take out the whole floor in that room and just replace it, but we don't like the idea of tearing something old out just to put the same something new in its place. Instead, we bought a bundle of select oak and began fitting it all back together.

It was my first foray into flooring repair and I think I did a pretty decent job. There are things I'd do a little differently now, like use spacers to create a little gap between the new boards in order to better mimic the look of the old floor, but otherwise, we're pretty happy with the results.

It took just a few hours to weave in the new flooring with the old. Once it was all in, I noticed the new flooring was roughly 1/8" higher than the old. I didn't think of it before installing, but it makes sense. The old floor was about 100 years old, and it had probably been refinished several times prior to having the bathroom floor laid over it. The refinishing had taken the surface down a bit, so the new floor would obviously be higher. If I were doing this again, I'd probably take about 1/8" off of the bottom of the new floor on the table saw. Had I done that, it would have saved me a lot of time sanding to get the height to match.

Once the floor had all been laid we decided to try our hand at refinishing the floor. We had seen a very DIY friendly random orbit sander on an episode of This Old House and a local Home Depot had this sander available for rent. This is actually the same type of sander we used when we refinished the floor in the major kitchen project. One weekend morning we drove out to the Home Depot and rented it for the day. I must say, if you're interested in refinishing your own floors, this is the way to go.

The sander is heavy and does most of the work -- you just need to keep changing the Velcro discs as needed. The best part is that the random orbit movement makes the job easy. 

You can get right into corners without any special tools, and you don't need to go with the grain of the wood like you'd need to with the large drum sander. But one thing is for sure, the sander is LOUD. I ended up wearing the headphones I typically use when going to NASCAR races, which did the trick quite nicely.

Once the floors were sanded we applied several coats of stain to match the flooring color of the rest of the house. Our stain of choice is the Minwax "Early American."

As we completed the first coat of stain we started to notice the new flooring was coming up much lighter than the old. It seemed like the old flooring was accepting the stain far more readily.

Before we applied the polyurethane, but after allowing the first coats of stain to dry, we devised a little plan to correct the color issues we had noticed. Using blue painters tape we taped off the perimeter of the boards that appeared a bit lighter.

We then applied a few more coats of stain to the lighter boards. After quite a bit of careful taping and staining the end result was a repaired floor that could almost pass for always being there. We were quite happy with our efforts and were looking forward to what the office could become.

Though the office wasn't quite "complete," we had gotten over one of the biggest hurdles in its renovation, and were quite happy with how it had turned out. The only real "blemish" throughout the floor are the two dark spots in the bottom of the photo above. Those were from two nails that let water down into the wood floor. We just figure they add "character," and luckily the rug in this room hides this area.

Have you ever had to make major repairs to wood flooring during any of your projects? Are you a tear out and replace it type of person, or did you weave it in like we did? And what did you think about the refinishing process? I'd love to hear some other peoples' take on this task.

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If you're a regular reader, you may remember a few months back we went into great detail about our custom cherry built in desk and the process we took to create it. Though we covered the various aspects of the desk build in depth, we never really talked all that much about the process that took the room our desk resides in from cramped and hideous, to a place we enjoy working. In order to get you all caught up on this project, we'll do a little rundown of our major tasks in this room in a several part series, and we'll also be sure to point out the various lessons we learned while taking on some of the things we had never accomplished before this project.

Before our office was an office, to meet our needs, we used our back bedroom as both a room for a guest (as there was only room for a twin bed) and our office space for computers, bills, and the like. This less than ideal setup was mildly frustrating at times, and infuriating at others. Forget about a normal sized bed in the back room, or the ability for a pair of guests to stay upstairs.

The space that we currently refer to as our office actually started life as a part of our oversized and gross 1980's guest bathroom and a small closet. This inefficient use of space ate up nearly 1/3 of our upstairs, and limited our ability to have separate guest and office spaces. Here's a look at what our now office looked like on the day of our home inspection.

Hmm. Carving out an entire hallway to get to a nasty grey toilet? That bad boy had to go. I'm sure it's hard to picture the former layout, so here's a birds eye view at what we started with, and where we were headed.

Wendy and I got to work on converting the poorly used space to an office, but we had our fair share of difficulties along the way. The walls weren't insulated or even sheetrocked, the floor was seriously damaged, and we wanted to expose the brick on the back wall behind the desk. Despite these challenges, we dove right in and made quick work of removing all traces of the 1980s.

Our first step in the whole process was actually the horribly dirty process of removing the broken and falling off plaster from the rear brick wall to give that wonderful exposed brick look. Though the brick started out covered in a thick layer of plaster and sand (shown in the photo above), we ended up with a pretty good looking wall in the end. We quickly went from plaster on the wall to this...

...and then with a lot of scrubbing, we went to this...

I know, it actually looks a bit worse in some places in the second photo, but you'll have to trust me on this one. We needed to take a step or two back to make forward progress. Also, do you see the hold in the chimney? That chimney is not longer functional, as it's been cut off just under the roof, but at one point this hole served as a coal or wood stove's exit point for the house. It looks like there was probably actually a stove in every room upstairs as we've seen similar evidence in other rooms.

After the dirty work of plaster removal from the brick was complete, we needed to start putting things back together, so we decided to add just a little insulation to the walls. Since the exterior window wall of the office is right on the exterior brick wall, this area needed just a little help. We didn't want to lose much if any space in the room, so we attached 2x1 furring strips to the masonry with masonry screws and filled the voids between the furring strips with polyisocyanurate insulation.

If you're not familiar, polyisocyanurate is the rigid foam insulation you've probably seen at the store. It was perfect for the type of insulation since we knew exactly how thick it was and that it could easily fill the areas as necessary. We also tapes all of the pieces in place with a foil insulation tape. Sure, this isn't R-16 or anything, but it still helps an awful lot. We were then able to attach the drywall right to the furring strips to skin the wall.

Oh, and can you believe this is the same window that featured those nasty pink curtains? We were already feeling like the space was improving. Though more exposed brick may have been nice, the extra insulation and the fact the bricks were painted white in many areas made the drywall a better option.

The drywall we ended up using in this room was actually the fiberglass based DensArmor Plus. This was all the rage back then and you could find it at Lowes. You can actually see the back of it in this photo of Wendy looking oh so DIY cute.

I really liked this drywall and how easy it was to work with, and I liked the idea that it is mold resistent. I don't know why they don't sell or carry it anymore, but if you know, drop us a comment and let us know why.

Once the walls were in place, we turned our attention to patching up the awful and falling apart ceiling. Using our trusty plaster buttons, we secured the various sagging and cracked areas of the plaster.

Once secured, we were able to use our plaster skim coating skills and cover over top to give ourselves a beautifully smooth ceiling and walls and install our crown molding. Ahh, the things DIY dreams are made of.

As you can see form the photo above, we did put a speaker in the ceiling, and we were able to also install the window and door casings to match our original along the way. It's funny, after the tedious skim coating work, the various finish details like molding seemed to move right along.

Before we wrap up our first in a series of office recaps, I may have forgotten to mention the stupid thing I did that really threw a monkey wrench into our plans of office renovating. It seems that I'm no longer 18 and invincible, and I learned this the hard way. Just a short while into our office renovation work I was invited to play with a local softball team. Everything was going fine, I was having run, playing right field. Someone hit a popup into shallow right field and I decided I was going to go all out and try and catch the ball. As I got close to the ball I decided to dive, but realized in mid air I wasn't going to make the catch. I adjusted in the air, and tried to trap the ball and roll into the ground as I had done over a hundred times before, but something didn't go as planned. 

Instead my left shoulder hit the ground with all of my body weight behind it and I didn't roll. My collar bone took the brunt of the force and I heard a tremendously loud pop/crack. I jumped up to my feet and realized I couldn't lift my left arm and that my shoulder area hurt. When I put my right hand up on my collar bone and shoulder, I could feel things weren't right and the jagged edge of my bone was forcing my skin up like a tent pole. Here is what it looked like from the outside a couple of days after the incident. Though the bone already started to fall into place, you can see the bruising where it had really pushed up quite hard.

And here's a view of it from the inside.

I had severely fractured my clavicle, and this put a serious damper on our home renovations, ruined a planned trip to the Bahamas, and made Wendy have to care for me like I was an infant. When talking to my orthopedic surgeon, I told him how eager I was to get back to work on the house. Given the severity of the fracture, and the fact that he understood I wanted to be up on a ladder sooner than later, my surgeon recommended surgery to correct the break. About a week after the my stupidity, this was the new look I was going with.

And here it is again from the inside.

Can you believe it? A simple softball game turned into a titanium plate, eight screws, a month in a sling, and six months of physical therapy, not to mention about $13,000 in medical bills. I'm very glad I have good insurance, though I still don't have complete range of motion in my left shoulder.

Thanks to all of my foolishness, Wendy ended up doing some of the heavy lifting along with a very helpful friend. Can you see the glare of death Wendy is giving me in this photo? Yeah, she wasn't happy.

There you have it, that's how we kicked off our office renovation with a bang...or at least a really loud crack. We were on our way to a funcional home office, but we were slightly sidelined along the way. 

Have you ever started a renovation project only to be sidelined by an unrelated injury? Were you as frustrated as I was that I couldn't work on the house? Please share to make me feel like I'm not alone.

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Though our desk was a success from an aesthetics standpoint, it wouldn’t be a true “Alex” project without doing some sort of high tech integration. Truth be told, part of the reason I actually wanted to build my desk from scratch was due to my desire to go on my typical techno-overload. In other words, I wanted to build a desk that was constructed with tried and true woodworking techniques but only felt like it would be worth it if I were also packing it full of technology bells and whistles. Weird enough for you? Well, it's sort of the story of our whole house.

We're covering a lot of stuff in this post, so it is a little bit all over the place. If you have any specific questions about anything that you want me to elaborate on, let me know in the comments and I can provide more info on it there or as a separate post. Also, I know we covered much of this information in our original desk construction post from back in November, but some of it is worth repeater for new readers.

Even though the majority of the bells and whistles wouldn’t actually be used until the desk was pretty much completed, our planning and implementation for these aspects of the project started very early on. We kicked it all off by creating an access panel in the side of the left cabinet next to where the computer would ultimately live.

This desk access panel was a critical component to our overall concept of an "antique looking but functional for modern standards" desk. One of my major pet peeves of computers that are placed inside desks is that you have to completely remove the computer from the desk to do any work on it or to connect a new peripheral. This process involves disconnecting everything, pulling the computer out, probably scratching the shelf it sits on, and constantly having to shove extra lengths of wire behind the computer to allow for the necessary movement. What a hassle!

Rather than deal with all of the garbage associated with pulling the computer out, I thought “what if I build in a removable panel so I can take it off whenever I want to work on the computer?” With that innocent and simple concept, the “Pimp my Custom Desk” experience was fully underway.

After sketching the removable panel into our original desk concept I built it as sort of an open door without hinges. 

To disguise the fact that it could be taken off, I attached the baseboard directly to the panel. Once it was all stained, you can barely tell there is a panel there.

With the removable panel completed, I would have a great way to access the side and rear of my PC in a straight forward and easy manner. This would allow me to do any necessary work on the computer without the need to drag everything out, so problem number one was solved. 

But what about heat from the computer, where would that go?

As you may know, computers create a tremendous amount of heat, and in a cabinet that heat needs somewhere to dissipate, otherwise it will end up shortening the life of the computer, or worse, killing it altogether. For this I decided that I needed to wire up a couple of computer fans right into the desk. Yes, you read that right, I wanted to include computer fans right into the design of the desk.

I figured that heat rises, so I cut a hole near the top and rear of the left cabinet above where the computer would eventually live (that's the large square cutout above the access panel in the earlier photo). The hole was large enough for two 90mm computer fans to be mounted side by side, but far enough back so you wouldn’t actually see it unless you were looking for it.

After making a paper template with all of the various holes necessary, I cut a custom fan grill out of a bit of the cherry so I could mount the fans to the grill before installing them in the desk, and then install the fan grill in place. Though I'm sure it doesnt look it, It was a huge effort to make a detail item like this, but well worth it in making the completely hidden fans look very neat and tidy.

Since I was going to be powering the fans using an AC to DC 12v converter, a world of possibilities opened when it came to additional accessories I could use to make the desk as cool (not temperature in this case) as possible. I decided that no good computer project can be completed without the use of some nerdy mood lighting. Besides, if I removed the panel from the desk, I would need light to be able to work on the computer, right? So I wired up two blue cold cathode tubes to light the interior compartment of the computer cabinet.

One evening, after weeks of waiting, I wired everything up and tested out the fans and lights. IT WAS AWESOME!

No joke, the desk looked like it was something out of Tron (one of my favorite childhood movies). Here it is with the normal lights on.

One item of note: Though cool looking, blue lights are not very practical to light your work area, and I still need to use a small flashlight. It's plenty of light, you just can't differentiate colors of wires or really tell what you're doing. But hey, you look cool fumbling around.

The final item I wired up in this removable panel compartment was a pressure sensitive switch that turns the blue light on only when the side panel of the desk is removed, but shuts them off when the panel is replaced. Makes sense, right? Why would I need the lights on when the desk’s side panel is closed?

During desk construction we also placed the necessary network cabling next to the outlet that sits in the compartment beneath the bottom shelf and drilled several large holes in the shelves to allow wires to pass from compartment to compartment. Ultimately everything works its way down to an area beneath the bottom shelf that is only accessible when the panel is off of the side of the desk. This area is where the network and power for the PC come from and also where the external hard drive lives. It’s a wonderfully convenient place for it and keeps the rest of the cabinet from being completely cluttered.

In addition to the holes in each shelf in the left cabinet, I knew we would have quite a few wires running through various parts of the desk. Whether we’re talking about the wires to the speakers, monitors, a USB hub, keyboard and mouse receivers, or anything else that the computer had to direct connect to, those wires needed to somehow get from their destination back to the computer in the desk. To accommodate this I cut several hidden holes in the various desk cabinets.

These holes allow the wires to run from location to location, only appearing where absolutely necessary. If there’s one thing I hate it’s exposed wires running all over the place when they could be concealed. This hatred for wires especially goes for the lower portions of desks where the wires are often draping down haphazardly into your foot area. You can see it in the upper right of the computer compartment.

To solve this wire issue I opted to install a ledge support that would act as a wire raceway. The support would run between the left cabinet and right cabinet and would allow any wires to run from the PC, through the holes, and across the shelf without hanging down in the back of the desk. You can see it at the top of this photo. Oh, and the weird stain on the bottom of the drawer, that's actually where some stain seeped through from inside the desk. Oh well.

With all of the wires run, fans connected, and computer equipment installed, the desk still looked as neat and tidy as it did before we put anything in place. Mission accomplished.

But wait, I still have three more desk features I want to mention.

The first are my wireless headphones. When I’m up super late and working on the blog and watching episodes of The Office or Walking Dead, I don’t want to have my computer speakers turned up because Wendy is usually sleeping in our bedroom. Instead I use a pair of Seinheiser wireless headphones with charging base. I wanted to have easy access to them without having them sit out on the desk, but they also needed to connect to the computer. My solution? I wired up the base to the computer and then put a few screws under the desk to mount the base to. Now the headphones are neatly tucked under the desk and charged for when I need them. All I need to do it grab them and put them on and I’m listening wirelessly to whatever is on my computer.

The second hidden gem is what I did inside of the main desk drawer. We knew we wanted to be able to charge devices (like phones or cameras) but didn’t want chargers all over the place. We also have a need for various USB devices that are easily accessible, like card readers or anything else. Again, rather than have this stuff all sitting on the top of the desk or in a hard to reach area, I decided on something a little bit cool.

I figured I could build a plug into the back of the desk drawer. I built a small wooden box that could house a gang box, cut a small hole in the rear of the drawer, and attached the box to the rear of the drawer.

I then installed a duplex outlet in the hole and connected the end of a short extension cord to it. We were able to run that cord to an outlet in another part of the desk and, BAM, we have a desk drawer with power. We ran a USB wire from this part of the desk over to the computer and we were in business. Now we can charge our cell phones, camera battery, hook up devices for connection to the computer so I can program them, and even house my card reader so I can connect to VPN without needed to have the stuff sitting on the desk. 

Unfortunately, this drawer has gotten a little messy over time. Here’s more recent shot of the drawer to show how what it holds today. Let's go ahead and add this to the list of things that needs to get organized up on our "clean every cabinet and drawer" resolution for 2012.

And finally, a more recent addition to the desk comes in the form of more lighting. When I built the desk, LED lighting was rather new and still somewhat expensive. Recently, after one of the desk fans started to buzz and needed to be replaced, I started browsing around a PC mod accessory site and found some inexpensive LED lighting tape. I decided to buy some and give it a shot. Here's a shot of the tape and how it is installed (with bad lighting and poor photography skills highlighted).

The LED tape is flexible, super easy to work with, and is applied using some double sided tape. I was able to hook it up to the existing wiring for the other lighting and had additional blue desk under-glow in just a couple of minutes.

Really, who doesn’t need blue mood lighting under-glow in their custom antique inspired cherry desk? If you ask me, I’d say “Nobody!”

There you have it, the “Pimp My Ride” of DIY desks executed to the fullest. By the way, Wendy wants me to point out that our "desk underglow" is only permitted when I'm doing work on the computer or I'm nerding out in my office alone. Underglow is not the approved lighting of choice for day-to-day operations or when guests are present. <sigh> I just wish she understood how cool this is.

What do you think? Is the end result of my efforts thoroughly overkill and sufficiently cool? Did I miss anything obvious that I absolutely should have included? I’ve already thought about doing integrated water cooling for the computer so I don’t need to hear fans. Any other ideas are welcomed. 

If you liked this entry, be sure to check out our whole collection of desk building posts that recaps the adventure from concept to functional office furniture. 

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