About two years ago, my uncle called me up, offering to give me his old computer desk. It was a 1990 Steelcase — a monster of a desk. It had a filing cabinet on the right side, and was made of steel. It weighed a ton, it was huge and I loved it. It even had AT&T inventory tags on the underside of the work surface. Whoops.

Notice that’s all in past tense. Because this morning, my desk died.

The cabinet drawers became locked a few days ago. I have a key to the desk, but after trying to unlock them, it became clear that the lock wasn’t actually attached to anything. I decided to try a trick I found online of taking the back panel off, then tipping the desk back, which would allow the rod to dis-engage.

Sadly, when I took the rear panel off, the desk went wobbly real quick. It ended up breaking off a bolt on the right side, and bending the right leg panel and brackets so bad I couldn’t get it on straight again. The sheer weight of the desk was its demise. Thankfully, I had removed my 24-inch iMac, Harman Kardon SoundSticks, Apple Extended II keyboard and Guardian Maximus FireWire RAID before I began.

So now, I am on a quest to build1 an awesome, yet minimal desk.

I have some requirements. I want to have built-in cable management2 to keep my gear out of my two-year old’s “temptation zone.” I also want to be able to hid my APC Batter Backup and maybe even the RAID — the latter of which needs some airflow to keep cool. I also know I want solid sides, not 4 individual legs, and maybe a bookcase built into one of them. My wife and I going to purchase a separate filing cabinet, which should make this build a bit easier.

For the time being, I’ve swiped a very tiny desk we had in our bedroom for the iMac. I have the Apple chiclet keyboard hooked up, since there’s not room on the desk for the Extended II.3 The speakers are boxed up as well for now. The one upside is that I moved the RAID to an open space underneath the drawers in the desk, so the setup is a little quieter now, but definitely more cramped.

Obviously, I’m not very far into this project, but I promise to keep you updated. Every nerd needs a good man cave, or at the very least, a killer desk.

  1. By “build,” I mean hand my dad tools. He’s been building houses for three decades. ↩︎

  2. I love the idea of using a rain gutter to keep cables off the ground. ↩︎

  3. And wow, it is hard to adjust to this thing… I keep getting lost on the keyboard. ↩︎