Desks
Our house has a REALLY oddly shaped 4th bedroom. It's obviously designed not to be a bedroom but a some sort of a utility room, like a study or a game room or whatever. Of particular note are three features: Double/French doors, a 45 degree angle on one wall and an "indent" where the window is that gives an extra foot of depth to that part of the room.
We had always intended to use this room as a study, but the odd shape made it very hard to make the most of it, despite being relatively large. We had already replaced the closet with a Murphy Bed so that the room could be used as a guest room without it taking any space, but we wanted to do more to make the most of the room. In the end, custom desks were the solution.
The key feature of the custom desks is a deep cutout into the "indent" that allows us to make use of that "indent" as a computer station. Otherwise one ended up with an 'L' shaped desk with a very deep section that wasn't very usable. The cutout basically gave us a 3rd desk spot, a computer station and a big desk for working on either side.
Of course, with that cutout coming at a 45 degree angle and the 45 degree wall at the bottom of the 'L', this project has a lot of odd angles like the bookselves. So, while it too was started on May 23rd, it was finished just a couple weeks before the bookshelves on October 1st, for a grand total of 131 days.
The final thing that added to the complexity was a desire to baby-proof everything in the study. We've found the most difficult room to baby proof is the study particularly in the area of computers. There's just a ton of wires going all sorts of places, everything from power to networking to speaker to keyboards and mice. Our solution to this problem was to create a "channel" on the back of the desk that would hold all of the cables. Then, other than dropping down cables to the power outlets and to the desktop computer, all of the cables would be out of harms way. Originally the desktop computer was going to have a highly complex cabinet built for it that both concealed it and allowed for cabling changes, however, somewhere around the 100 day mark a design change was made to use plastic to cover the cabling and power buttons for the computer. All of these baby proofing features can be seen in the 2nd row of pictures.
We had always intended to use this room as a study, but the odd shape made it very hard to make the most of it, despite being relatively large. We had already replaced the closet with a Murphy Bed so that the room could be used as a guest room without it taking any space, but we wanted to do more to make the most of the room. In the end, custom desks were the solution.
The key feature of the custom desks is a deep cutout into the "indent" that allows us to make use of that "indent" as a computer station. Otherwise one ended up with an 'L' shaped desk with a very deep section that wasn't very usable. The cutout basically gave us a 3rd desk spot, a computer station and a big desk for working on either side.
Of course, with that cutout coming at a 45 degree angle and the 45 degree wall at the bottom of the 'L', this project has a lot of odd angles like the bookselves. So, while it too was started on May 23rd, it was finished just a couple weeks before the bookshelves on October 1st, for a grand total of 131 days.
The final thing that added to the complexity was a desire to baby-proof everything in the study. We've found the most difficult room to baby proof is the study particularly in the area of computers. There's just a ton of wires going all sorts of places, everything from power to networking to speaker to keyboards and mice. Our solution to this problem was to create a "channel" on the back of the desk that would hold all of the cables. Then, other than dropping down cables to the power outlets and to the desktop computer, all of the cables would be out of harms way. Originally the desktop computer was going to have a highly complex cabinet built for it that both concealed it and allowed for cabling changes, however, somewhere around the 100 day mark a design change was made to use plastic to cover the cabling and power buttons for the computer. All of these baby proofing features can be seen in the 2nd row of pictures.
