Ever have that moment when you've spent well over a week building a great big custom desk for your office, you are just about to start staining it, when you realize the laws of physics will not allow it to enter your office? As in, two of the five components will not fit at all without major disassembly? And you emptied a whole bottle of wood glue in the construction?
Darn physics.
So goes my Christmas holidays project, one that is over 23 years in the making. Back in Grade 12 I realized I needed a desk for university. So I bought one at an auction sale in downtown Yorkton. It was one of those steel type ones, possibly from the 1960s or ‘70s, identical to my dad’s. I put my then brand-new 486DX computer on it, and I was set. That was until I realized that old style desks were about three inches higher than computer desks, and my arms immediately started cramping up.
Out came the hacksaw, and soon it was the proper height.
This desk has followed me to Saskatoon, Rosetown, North Battleford and Estevan. I spend most of my day at it, working from home. But at 72 x 30 inches, it’s simply not large enough for my needs and my mammoth computer system. So a few years ago I hatched an idea. I would rebuid it. I had the technology. I have the capability to make it into an oak desk. Better than before. Better, stronger, faster … oh, wait.
What I would do would involve facing the front of the desk with oak plywood and replacing the top with oak plywood, nicely stained and varnished.
I made the new top, but it would have to wait until the rest could be completed. In the meantime, I built a hutch over the original desk, out of oak plywood and a few solid oak pieces. This has been the home to my desktop computer, two uninterruptible power supplies, 10 hard drives, a RAID and scanner. The idea was to get these all at least four feet off the floor in case we ever had flooding in our basement.
It was all well and good until I found out my custom computer case, with feet removed, was still one-quarter inch too tall to fit in nicely. Grrrrr …
For seven years my office has had an eight-foot plastic table behind me that largely collects paper and junk. That would need to go. In its place, I would finish the original desk project, and make a U-shaped desk. In total I would gain about 24 feet of additional shelf and desk space, when done, but it would take almost every cubic inch of my small basement office to do so.
I pulled out my old university drafting kit and set to work, first measuring and mapping the office, then using cutouts of the various components, as planned, to see if they would work. All seemed fine, and as soon as we got home from Christmas visiting I set to work. Over the next week the kids rarely saw me without a layer of sawdust. Spencer refused to hug me unless I was clean.
Just as I was applying the trim molding, I realized I had an eight-foot piece in my hand. I grabbed it and a framing square and did a dry run of moving all these components into the basement and then my office.
Turns out I can’t go straight from the garage to the basement. The eight-foot desk and hutch would not make the turn. So it will have to come in the front door.
I had thought I could turn these on their sides and then hook them around and through the door into the office, set them upright, and all would be well. That might have been the case if I had not spent the week reinforcing them like crazy because, without it, they were sagging under their own weight, without a load. So now I had two strong structures that would not fit around the corner into my office, even when I remove the trim molding on the inside of the door jams.
Here’s where physics came into play. As far as I recall, you cannot have two distinct objects, made of typical matter, occupying the same place at the same time. Thus, the desk and doorframe could not both exist in that same place.
So two components, all screwed and glued, are coming apart. And when they are reassembled, in the office, it will take a reciprocating saw with a demolition blade to get them out.
Next week: What do you do with a 150-pound chair that cost $6,000 but destroys every floor surface it's on?
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
