After years of dreaming and several weekends over several months spent sourcing, measuring, figuring, cutting, building and painting I have the desk of my dreams. It’s beautiful! So beautiful I never want to leave it! (j/king in a couple weeks we leave for a couple months, but I’ll get to come back home to this!)
The desk is built from 3/4″ black iron pipe and has a 3/4″ custom cut bamboo plywood top.
I’ve long wanted an L shaped corner desk. I like to have extra room on my desks and I like to stretch out my legs, so this arrangement is perfect. I’ve looked for years for something just like this and could never find it. Ikea’s Bekant desk comes close and was very tempting, but wasn’t quite perfect. Not to mention there is no Ikea in Hawaii and they won’t ship to Hawaii. I could (and have in the past) arrange shipping myself but it gets expensive fast. Combining this desk with my treadmill desk (just out of the pictures to the right) I now have the work environment of my dreams.
If people want I’ll try to put together a more detailed write up with pricing and how I planned and built it. For now though I just wanted to share the joy and the photos!
A few detail shots of the beveled edge of the bamboo plywood. Note: I was planning on cutting and staining the top myself. I hate staining and I’d have whimped out and done a straight cut on the corner instead of the radius, so I’m glad I hired that out, it was crazy expensive, but they did a fabulous job.
Nice Jon! And I’ve got my eye on that treadmill desk…
Funny because I thought I’d made a post a while back about the treadmill desk but never did I guess… need to do that… she’s sitting there waiting for you.
It’s a she?
This is awesome Jon! I was just sketching up an idea for an iron pipe desk, when I thought,” Why don’t I just Google and see if someone has already done it.” This is it! Can you reply with a bit more detail? I love the pics of the pieces you used. Do you happen to have measurements? Also, where did you find the bamboo plywood? I live in Central Oregon and I’ve never seen that.
Thanks for any help you can give!
Thanks Greg! I was inspired by a few posts on instructables and elsewhere, but ultimately these are all a little unique! I measured a lot, but ultimately I went down to Home Depot, fastened things together and measured them there. The problem is the amount the threading goes in varies some… so the only really good way to know exact lengths is to put the parts you want together and measure the legs, then swap out the nipples (short threaded on both ends) for a different size until you get what you want.
For the longer sections I mostly used off-the-shelf sizes, but you can (and I did) get a couple of them cut to length (Home Depot/Lowes/etc..) will all cut pipe to length… the trick is know the right length! Again, the best thing is bring it home dry fit it all, then go back and get things cut.
As for bamboo plywood it’s a thing you can get from a lot of speciality wood suppliers, it’s used in cabinets and flooring… I got mine here: https://bamboomaui.com/ but there are only a couple of manufactures and you can pretty quickly google who distributes what in your area. Let me know what you build!