For those who haven't seen them yet, This Old House has two galleries of photos up (one, two) that show the worst of the worst things found during home inspections. Most of it is in the you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it category; wait until you see the light switch in the shower stall, or the 220-volt plug hard-wired bare to the incoming power line. This kind of stuff makes me cringe, mostly because it reminds me that any of my neighbors might have done something like this and I won't know until their house comes (crashing, burning, rotting, or flooding) down to the ground.

After installing the quarter-round molding across the back of the surface and then touching everything up with a final bit of paint, the new desk is installed, and I'm pretty damn happy with how it came out.

The back surface of the desk is 20 inches deep, and we opted to put the PC there since it's the computer that we use the most in the office. Since the office is pretty narrow, we went with the return being only 15 inches deep, giving us more work surface without sacrificing breathing room. I doubt that we'll stick with that lamp, we have a little bit of cable management work to do, and I'm almost certain that I won't be allowed to keep the Iron Giant on the desk. (I have been promised a little bit of a shelf for him, though!)

In the end, there are a few silly little things I'd do differently were I to do this again, but nothing that comes close to me feeling like this wasn't a home run for us being able to use the study. I can't wait to get the shelves planned and installed... our inclination is to put them on the short wall above the main desk surface so that the room doesn't start to feel even more narrow, but we've bandied about the idea of partial-length shelves on the long wall. We'll see which way that debate settles out, and we'll enjoy the hell out of the room in the mean time!

One of the things that really attracted Shannon and I to this house is that it has a small "extra" room upstairs, too small to be a regular bedroom but definitely workable as a study (or perhaps someday a nursery!). Since we moved in, we tried our hardest to make the furniture we already own work in the room, but it's been a struggle -- the desk, file cabinet, and drawers I had in my luxuriously-large study back in Brookline made this room really tight, and Shannon and I realized about a month ago that it was the one space in the house that made us both annoyed whenever we had to spend more than a few minutes in it. That's not so good, so I decided to see what I could do to improve it, and came to the conclusion that a built-in desk would make a world of difference.

(An explanation of why a built-in desk was such an epiphany starts with the knowledge that the functional workspace of the study is just under 37 square feet, specifically 53 inches by about 100 inches. So every inch really matters -- and eating into that are baseboards that stick out slightly more than two inches from each wall. All of our existing furniture sat against that baseboard and hurt us by wasting the space behind it; realizing this led me to the built-in idea, and then embarrassingly, an episode of Toolbelt Diva that Shannon saw sold us.)

So, after a bit of design-by-Adobe-Illustrator, I came up with a desk idea that incorporates a 20-inch-deep main surface spanning the narrowest part of the room and a 15-inch-deep return that runs the length of the long wall, all supported by ledger boards and a few diagonal struts. The goal was to move the work surface to the most logical spot in the room and optimize the amount of floor real estate by avoiding desk-to-floor supports; that way, we can put drawers on the floor underneath the desk unimpeded by legs or supports, and we can turn in our desk chair without banging our own legs or being restricted in any way. Likewise, we wanted to see whether we liked the new layout, and thenfree up even more storage by hanging some shelves along the narrow part of the room above the desk.

The dimensions of the desk were just large enough to prevent the whole thing being able to be cut as a single piece of a 4x8 sheet of finished plywood, so I had Home Depot cut us two pieces, one for the main surface and one for the return. Using a router, I notched both pieces so they'd come together across a secure joint, and then mitered some screen molding to tack onto the facing edge. While Shannon was priming all that, I cut the ledger boards and tested them out on the walls, and just before bed last night we got the ledgers on the walls and the first coat of paint on the desk surface and supports.

This morning, Shannon started the second coat of paint while I mitered some quarter round molding to run along the back edge of the desk (thus hiding the seam where it meets the wall). We primed and painted that, and after the Eagles game this afternoon, I installed the desk on the ledger boards. As we speak, the wood filler is drying in the screw holes holding the desk onto the ledgers and supports, and later tonight I'll throw a third coat of paint on the whole setup. Tomorrow will likely bring the final step, attaching the molding to the back edge, and we should be all done! It's already clear how big a change this will be; that room will go from barely tolerable to one of my favorite in the house, and I'm sure Shannon and I will start to quibble over who gets to be sitting and working in there. We can only hope!

(Note that I put up a Flickr photo set with pictures of the whole process; the set includes the pictures from this post, but has a few more as well.)

I'm not sure how I failed to find this during my great miter saw hunt a few weeks ago, but back in 2002, someone named Tom Judkins penned an awesome post to rec.woodworking that goes into how to decide on a particular type of miter saw. His level of detail is terrific, and he includes a lot of tips on how to check whether a saw will cut true, kick your work off of the table, and help prevent injuries. It's worth a bookmark in any woodworker's browser.

Since I was out of town all weekend (and crushingly, haven't been able to play with my new saw yet!), let's take a swing around the web and see what the last week has brought.

• From the Chicago Tribune comes a few tips: hanging an extra layer of drywall on either side of an existing wall will make a room a lot quieter, and working with glass blocks is much easier if you use a new system that trades mortar for plastic channels and silicone caulk. There's also an autumn checklist for projects that'll help make sure you're insulated for the coming cold.
• Do you have cracks running down your walls? According to the Boston Globe's handyman on call, those cracks might only be in the paint layer and not the wall itself; fixing them might only take a light sanding and a final thin coat of paint. The folks behind the San Francisco Chronicle's Sweat Equity column address cracks that are run a bit deeper and appear at sheetrock joints, explaining why they happen and recommending how you go about repairing them so they look as good as new.
• Do you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of your toilet's water supply coming on and refilling the tank even though nobody's used it? The Ask the Expert column in the Seattle Times recommends dropping a bit of food dye into the tank to help pinpoint where the leak might be.
• Finally, the Philadelphia Inquirer takes a look at "manspaces", from redone subterranean basements to backyard writing sheds, and likes what it sees.

The U.S. government might be engaged in a heated debate over the definition of torture, but here in Casa Queso, it's pretty clear that the term includes such things as having to take a weekend trip to Chicago the day after this box arrived as my anniversary present from Shannon:

Seriously, I cannot wait to get that bad boy set up!

From today's New York Times comes a pretty sweet article about homes designed with hidden rooms. I'll admit the same thing that one of the people profiled in the article does: this has always been a fantasy of mine, having a small space tucked away behind a bookcase or false wall; it has precious little to do with privacy and a tremendous amount to do with sheer dorkiness. Heck, after reading about Maggie and Jason's discovery of a hidden room in their house during a renovation, I'm pretty sure I had a dream or two that Shannon and I found one in ours. Nevermind that our lot is all of 15 feet wide, and we can account for every square inch of our home without even breaking a sweat... I can't imagine where I'd tuck a hidden room. But a man can dream!