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Thursday, September 01, 2016

A Real Desk


Above: Nice-looking but does any real work take place on that anorexic model?

Problem: I have a desk at the office and one at home. Neither one is adequate. Each was designed to look good but not to work well. I am a messy desk person who likes to spread out projects and easily shift from priority to priority.

Those meager designs won't cut it.

Answer: I am going to have to design my own desk. It doesn't need to be fancy but it does need to be functional and, in this realm, size matters. 

Hmm: I just remembered a friend - a city engineer - who passed away a few years ago. He had a marvelous desk. It looked like a wooden replica of the Pacific Ocean. 

I might use that as a prototype. Report to follow.
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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:05 PM

    Once at a client site, I sat at a desk I liked. It was a Steelcase or some such, and was sparse and utilitarian. So I measured it, made it bigger to fit the space I had, and did a first pass in plywood. The plywood version survives to this day. It's just basically an L-shaped desk where you sit at the inside corner. I extended the short end to match the other end and called it good. As I recall, I just split a 4x8' sheet and threw it together. I guess in some things I'm simply a barbarian.

    Speaking of tools, here is the Cornell Note Taking System. I saw this at American Digest; some URLs:


    http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/tools/free_cornell_no.php
    http://www.gearfire.net/cornell-note-templates/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Notes

    Template generators (faint attribution at bottom of page)
    http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/cornelllined/
    http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/cornellgraph/

    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous11:24 PM

    Oops, I didn't quite split the 4x8' plywood. Strange, I thought that considering I'm sitting at the desk now. I cut the first sheet into an L-shape, and then split another sheet, leaving a spare half-sheet. I wanted to move the seam away from the center.

    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  3. Michael Wade8:14 AM

    Jim,

    Those are two very helpful sets of comments.

    I like the plywood idea for my home office and am toying with the idea of a modified u-shape.

    Many thanks and thanks also for the Cornell Note Taking System info.

    Michael

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous11:58 PM

    Thank you, Michael. My office has the L-shaped desk on two walls, a floor to ceiling bookcase on the 3rd wall, and a spare desk on the 4th wall. I considered a U-shaped desk, but couldn't decide how much space to leave in the middle. Once I decided on the bookcase, it no longer mattered due mostly to where the door was. I wanted as many linear feet for the bookcase as possible, and that's just the way it fit.

    Jim

    ReplyDelete
  5. Michael Wade7:27 PM

    Jim,

    Thanks for the additional information. It is helpful.

    I may have to abandon the u-shaped desk but may be able to pull it off by placing a smaller filing cabinet under one or both sides. It may turn out to be more of a rigid than a rounded U-shape but with the file storage needs addressed I will have more room for bookcases.

    Michael

    ReplyDelete