The Adventures of Arcly and Elo: Making a desk

I just made rice pudding and it is delicious. That's not really the point of this post, but it's true. Rice pudding is delicious and SO easy to make. And cheap. I should blog about it sometime.

Anyways, I want to make a desk. I have fallen in love with really expensive furniture since I got a job, but... turns out expensive furniture is expensive. There is an amazing desk at Bo Concept. I love the design - it's simple, but exceedingly functional. I also think that because it has a perpendicular component, it ends up making a distinct work area in a small space... such as my very tiny living room. It looks like this.

....aaaand, it costs $2,395. Which is A LOT of money. So I figured since it's only made of MDF, it's probably not worth anywhere CLOSE to what they are charging, and I decided to make it. With a lot of help from my dad. For around $87 worth of material. Thankfully we have had a very mild winter so far in Ctown, AB.

His shop is not super well set up, so it's been a bit of a challenge. The desk is almost done now, with just a few cuts to go. Basically, it's involved a lot of dado-ing. Making a dado is basically making an incision into a piece of wood (ex: the end piece of a bookshelf) that another piece of wood gets slotted into (ex: the shelf for a bookshelf). It's a type of joinery. If you have a table saw, you just get a dado attachment, set the width and depth of the dado, and run the wood through. We don't have a dado though, and my dad's 'foldable' table saw scares me anyways. So we've been making our dados using a scroll saw.

The first thing you do is manually draw in the width of the slot you want to make. Then you need to measure the width of the saw so you can set up a guide at the correct offset. Personally, I find all the measuring exceedingly boring, so I just stand around and watch. Something tells me this might not be a life-long hobby for me.

Now you've set up two guide lines at the proper offsets to cut two lines that delineate the width of your notch. Go at 'er with the scroll saw.

After you've cut two lines that delineate the width of your notch, you need to cut multiple more within the initial two cuts. It ends up looking like this:

Now, you need to get all the material out from the notch, so it's .... a nice notch. You use a chisel. I like this part. The MDF just peels up... for some weird reason, it feels nice.