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.)