The Mega Desk

My girlfriend and I share a loft as our home office. It’s 8x12 feet, but due to it being exposed to the level below the 8-foot wide wall is the only sensible spot for a desk — but no standard desk spans 8 feet. And putting two desks against different walls would eat the room alive. We needed one big desk. A mega desk. The process was new to me, fun, and I wanted to share the steps on building a desk to your exact dimensions.

If you Google “8 foot desk,” you’ll quickly run out of results, especially if you filter by price. The closest thing I found is popular IKEA countertop hack, where you slap a kitchen countertop on Alex bookshelves. I considered this myself. But they’re not deep enough, and you commit to a (rather low) fixed height. I wanted a standing desk so I didn’t have to think about proper height, and more depth for messier projects.

There are plenty of standing legs online, but none that supported the 8 foot width. I decided to build the tabletop first and figure out the legs later.

We got our hardwood from MacBeath Hardwood in Berkeley. We chose a dark burnt ash because the grain was gorgeous and we were looking for a darker wood. Next we needed a workshop. While looking for hack spaces to get access to the tools we needed we were invited to use a friends father’s woodworking shop. Renting a hack space was honestly kind of confusing, and for many of the tools I needed a level of hand holding some would call “more work than doing it themselves”, so this couldn’t have been better.

We spent two days to transform our planks into a desk. First we recut the edges to make them perfectly square, and used a domino tool to cut little tabs in each edge. Now the boards fit together cleanly, tabs on one side, fitting into the recess on the other. We glued up each tab one at time, pausing to fasten with clamps and cure. Finally by lunch we had a desktop. A very rough desktop. The glue still needed more time to cure, so we planned to return the next day for sanding.

I showed up the next day like any client I knew – with scope creep. After returning home I overnighted hardware for desk drawer and wanted to install it on the underside. Frank, the resident pro of our workshop (his home), had instilled too much confidence in me. The drawer concerned him, I’m not sure if for the success of the project or the return of his garage.

The next few hours were sanding the planks down to make one flat surface. To start we used a belt sander which did the work of hiding the seams, then an orbital sander to make it smooth enough to count as indoor furniture. This was a hugely rewarding point, the desktop was smooth, the carefully selected ordering of the planks by Frank so ones seam flowed into the next was effortless. All that was left was to install the drawer. It was rather easy to do, a little more glue and light sanding, it wasn’t as important a location under the desk. Frank was pleasantly surprised.

Now I had an 8-foot hardwood tabletop on my office floor and no legs.

I found these dual-motor legs on Amazon which were perfect. A Single motor meant a rod had to go across the underside of the desk to turn the gears on both legs, making a hard limit in the max width. Dual-motor meant you just needed a cable run across. I believed the distance between these legs could be extended wide enough for the job. They arrived. I mounted them. And unfotunately the way the I/O was facing left me just short!

I stared at the cable for a while and considered splicing it. something I don’t really know what it entails, and if I messed up I’d have no cable. But then the internet did its beautiful thing. A creator on Etsy — JACKreationsUS — makes extensions of the exact cable I needed, at whatever length I wanted. Apparently this cable was also used for an old bamboo 3D printer model. I zoomed in on product photos as far as I could to compare pin layouts, and they matched. I was even able to order a custom length.

If I did it again, I’d glue up a rotated board underneath for added support. Eight feet is a lot of unsupported wood. For now, I’ve got a filing cabinet supporting the middle while not in standing mode (always).

And that’s mega desk. We have no complaints — we’re not at the desk at the same time all that often, which probably helps. It gives us our own workspace without filling the room. When we are at it together, we sit a little closer than coworkers in an open office, but isn’t that what partners are for. Overall, it makes the room so much better than any two-desk arrangement would have.