A working home office remodel

For the past 2 1/2 years, I've worked from home. I have a dedicated room that is my office and it needed some updating. It had some ratty old green carpet when we bought the house and I've been using a plastic folding table I bought at Wal-Mart for my desk. I had a giant garage storage shelf in there to hold stuff (office supplies, printers, networking equipment, etc.). It was not all that nice of a place, but I just need a place to work on the computer and make phone calls. There are no clients to entertain or anything like that, so it served me ok for a couple years. A few months back I decided it was time to tackle the room and make it what I wanted. The overall plan was to pull the carpet out and put in a new hardwood floor. I looked at various desks and just didn't see exactly what I wanted. I toyed with the idea of building a desk for a while. While thinking about all of this I got the notion that I would like an adjustable height desk that could be used sitting or standing. I even made a thread asking about standing desks (link).

This project is now complete and I really like how it turned out, so I figured I'd make this thread about it to show you all.

As a word of warning, when I am doing projects I typically only stop and take a picture if I think I will need to look at it later to figure out how something should go back together or when the task is finished, so my photos may or may not be all that useful.

As an example, I failed to take a before picture of my office. The closest I have is this:

That is after I removed the carpet and started on my wall shelf which I'll get to later, but it shows my fold up table desk and garage shelf in action. Like the kitchen thread, I still had to work in the room during the project during the week and then worked on the remodel on the weekends, so it added a bit of complexity to the work to make sure I always had a place to work (desk, computer, chair, internet connection, phone).

After a lot of thought, I decided I was going to go with built-in cabinets to make my desk. I did what any of us would do and headed to the nearest big box store and got some cabinet brochures. I went home and made a plan that consisted of a desk along the back wall under the windows and then cabinets that wrapped around the wall to the right. The blue tape on the floor in the above picture shows the cabinet layout plan.

I'll post more later when I have time.

Relevant topic for me! I'm getting ready to move my home office to a new room in our house but need to outfit it first.

In going through the kitchen remodel process, I've been looking to my home office (I'm also a work from home person) with a critical eye... Especially since my "office" is a room in the garage that used to be used as the tool crib. Plywood walls, tools all over, the works. I might want to fix it up a bit. Looking forward to seeing the results!

In reply to dyintorace:

Well, I hope this thread at least gives you some ideas. No promises for how often I write new posts though.

In reply to Mezzanine:

Your kitchen remodel thread is why I made this thread and even borrowed your naming convention.

Long story short, is that Lowes too way to long and had some limitations on their cabinets that I did not like (things like extended stiles as an example). I came across the Cabinet Joint website and watched a bunch of their videos. I never assembled nor installed cabinets before and was leary of going that route, but when I figured out I could get my cabinets customized as needed and get higher quality cabinets and hardware for about the same price as Lowes (all plywood instead of particle board, better drawer slides, extended stiles, etc.) and with the fact that Lowes would take a couple weeks between me asking for a change to the desing/layout and them responding with a quote, I ended up getting a quote from Cabinet Joint. I still wanted a standing desk though and thought about differing counter top heights and two separate work areas, but I didn't want to lose cabinet storage space and couldn't come up with a solution to move back and forth that would work for me. I considered putting cabinets along one wall and having a standing desk on the other side, but I wanted something a bit different than a desktop with two legs under it. I wanted it to look more like a traditional desk.

One night in a motel room in Red Wing, MN the idea hit me that I should put the adjustable height desk legs inside the cabinets so when in the down position my desk would look like a normal built-in desk, but when I wanted to I could raise it to standing height. An idea was born. Up to that point, my design existing on graph paper and a crude sketchup model so I could picture how it would look in 3D. Sketchup is too hard for me to ever quite figure out other than basics, so when I got to the point of trying to design in the standing desk, I drew up my plan in Autocad.

The plan I came up with consisted of using four desk legs instead of two since the two leg frames all seem to have a bottom member that is longer then my cabinet depth (24"). A place called Uplift Desk had what I needed, so I bit the bullet and based my design around their four legged desk frame. I say bit the bullet because those desk legs cost about half of a challenge budget.

That was too much writing and not enough pictures. Here is a random picture of a puppy. That always makes everyone feel better.

I used to use the top shelf of my giant garage shelf to hold my cable modem, router, a NAS drive, a stereo my Ooma phone and a cordless phone. Since the giant shelf needed to go early in the process to make room, I needed a place to put all this stuff since I needed it all in service so I could still work. I decided to not install any wall cabinets, and while looking for wall shelves that would work I cam across some Youtube videos of shelves that I liked. So, I came up with a quick plan on a 3x5 card, bought some wood and proceeded to make a shelf. The goal was to have the power strip and cords and whatnot hidden inside the shelf and I wanted to make it look like a railroad tie stuck to me wall. Seriously, that was the design goal.

I built a 5 sided box out of cheap pine boards and used a french cleat to hang it on the wall. There are three 2x4 pieces that support it and allow it to be pulled open to access the wire mess inside.

Here is my cleat ( you can also see on the right side of the cleat where my new outlet was going to go to power all this nonsense.):

And here is the unfinished shelf hung on the wall for a test fit:

At this point, I had ordered cabinets but did not yet have them and hadn't settled on a counter top yet. Turns out this wall has a fairly serious bow to it where it bulges out right in the middle of my shelf along a stud. The other side of the wall is my bathtub and I didn't want to open the wall up on that side and try to correct the stud, nor did I really want to get into a lot of drywall work, so I scribed the back of my shelf to conform to the wall. I was concerned what this would mean when it came to the base cabinet install (three cabinets were to go on that wall.)

Here is pic of the first coat of stain going on the shelf. Before staining, I banged a lot of items on it to create pock marks and divots since I wanted this to look like a railroad tie and not fine furniture.

Here is the shelf all stained and in place with all my junk on it and hidden inside it. At this point I still hadn't painted the walls yet and this would've been better to do after paint, but like I said I needed the giant shelving unit out of the way.

Here is what my work area looked like at that point. About the same as it always had just pulled away from the wall a bit and no carpet in the room - just some extra junk on the table that was displaced from where it was supposed to live.

I mentioned earlier that my tub is on the other side of the wall...well, this is not a regular tub. It is one that is jetted, heated and has stupid underwater lights. A terrible approximation of a tiny hot tub. Anyway, there is an access door on my office wall that opens up to access the heater, pump and whatever else is crammed in there. My plan originally was to make the desk area centered on this little door so it was still accessible, but I really wanted my desk to face the windows and the view. I ended up making the design so that the little access door would end up in a 30" wide cabinet. I figured that would still allow access if needed, although not as easy as before, but since we've used this tub exactly once in almost three years since we've been in the house, I figured it was an acceptable risk.

Here is the little door. Not that is matters, but this is under the wall shelf.

This is the plan I submitted to the cabinet joint to order the cabinets.

The room is situated on a rear corner of my house and the back two corners instead of regular corners have 4' walls that are at 45 degree angles. Each of the 4' 45 degree wall has a window. I wanted my counter to be along the back wall (my desk) and wrap around to the right. I decided to use two 18" desk bases on either side of the desk, and then planned for a 2 drawer cabinet for the 45 degree wall that I would use for hanging files. Then along the wall under the shelf, the plan was to install two 21" regular base cabinets with single drawers and in the center of that wall a 30" double butt door base cabinet with no drawer. That big cabinet would allow access to the tub stuff if needed and also provide a place to store my giant printer. Giant printer can be seen here: Note in the room layout plan, the desk legs are shown inside the 18" desk cabinets. The plan was to have standard sized drawer fronts, but have drawer boxes that were only 8" wide to leave room for the desk legs. More on that later.

Around that time, I was still trying to figure out my counter tops. I didn't have the budget for granite or even quartz or other type of solid surface. I briefly considered making concrete counters, but with the desk moving up and down did not like the weight. I considered laminate, and gathered a bunch of those little samples. I was planning on ordering the laminate material and glue and making these myself. The colors that I liked the most were the wood look laminates. This led me to the idea of using butcher block counters. Ikea has the best prices on these that I could find. Trouble is the nearest store is in Charlotte - about 3 hours away. I was in Tampa for work and made a trip to Ikea to check out the butcherblock. While there I bought a little LED light kit called a dioder because it was cheap and would fit into my carry on. Figured I should buy something other than a coffee while there. I had only been to an Ikea once before about 20 years earlier somewhere outside of Baltimore. I vaguely remembered the feeling of being in a maze and that they had little pencils like at the putt-putt. I guessed that they were somehow used to keep score of how many of the secret shortcuts you managed to find to get around the store quicker. The place is like a real life version of chutes and ladders.

When I got home, I had made my decision to go with Hammarp counter tops in beechHammarp counter tops in beech.

I also got the idea to install the dioder light along the bottom of my floating shelf and add the wires and plug mess to the mess already hidden inside.

Here is a pic with the lights on taken in the daytime.

As you can see, I ended up painting the wall around the shelf before installing it for the last time. The walls were going to be a color called antique jade....I liked it because I am getting to be an antique and am quite jaded. The color reminded me a bit of sea foam green that 75% of the interior of US submarines are painted. Legend had it that some psychological study determined that it was a calming color way back around the advent of nuclear powered subs because they were worried about the sailors all going bonkers since they could stay submerged as long as the had food. I had planned on some sort of light either on or under the shelf, so the outlet I installed behind it has one receptacle that is wired to the room wall switch.

After this, I painted the room's trim with a fresh coat of white paint and the walls with my new green color. It is so easy to paint baseboard when you only have a plywood subfloor and walls that you are going to paint anyway to deal with. No masking, just painting. Also painted window and door casings. The existing stuff was probably last painted in 1992 or so. Here is pic of one wall that is now a pleasant and calming green color. No, I do not live next to a giant radio telescope. The shadow on the wall is from my floor lamp that is in front of the window on the other 45 degree window.

At this point the cabinets arrived. They come broken down in flat packs sorta like this: Now it was time to assemble the cabinets. I was really hoping this was as easy and foolproof as the video made it seem. The drawer boxes come already built and not flat packed like the cabinet boxes.

Cabinet assembly went off with no issues. It really was as easy as the video made it seem. I was worried I shoot a wayward pin from my nail gun out one of the finished sides or something, but everything went together easily. I used part of the garage for assembly and a different part for assembled cabinet storage. The cabinet in the foreground is the right desk base cabinet. Finished on the left side with an extended stile on the right side. My plan was to have extended stiles on the cabinets that met at the 45 degree angles with the goal of having no filler strips. In a typical belt and suspenders move, I did order two 6" wide filler strips with the cabinets just in case. Not sure what I'll do with them now since I ended up not using them.

If anyone is interested, the cabinets are Cadet Grey with hard maple fronts. Cabinet Joint sells Conestoga cabinets and there are a lot of available colors and finishes.

At this point I needed to get serious with figuring out the details of how to install the desk legs in these cabinets. Here is a desk leg sitting inside a cabinet for a trial fitting.

I had planned on constructing some sort of dust top for the desk cabinets so when the desk was raised the contents of the top drawers were not visible. I made those out 1/4" luan plywood with a hole cut out for the desk legs. I also had to come up with a way to mount the drawer slides. The one side was easy, I just made a template to get the height and horizontal placement correct and installed the runners. For the side in the middle of the drawer opening the back was about the same other than I had to carefully figure out where to put the bracket horizontally to match the drawer box width. The desk cabinets have Bum Tandem plus Blumotion drawer slides. These are soft closing and have a good range of adjustability once installed. They are full extension and it is easy to remove the drawer if desired. They cost more than the standard drawer slides, but since the slides are under the drawer box, they allowed me to have the largest drawer boxes I could and still fit my desk legs in there.

I ended up using some small metal angle brackets I had in my metal junk pile collection. I think these may have came with some garage cabinets as corner reinforcements or something. Not sure exactly where I got them or why I saved them for years. but in this case it worked out.

Around this time the counter tops arrived. I ordered two 8' long pieces and one 6' long piece. I decided to miter the corners where they meet at the 45 degree section and have the counters meet at a 22.5 degree angle. This required me to use the longer pieces. I could have made this work with three 6' sections if I would've kept the desk and under the shelf sections as rectangles and then had the 45 degree wall section as a trapezoid with 45 degree angles.

I haven't talked about the outlet situation yet. I had a total of three outlets that were located on the walls that were to be covered by cabinets. I also had my new hidden outlet that I added behind the floating shelf but that was easy as I installed it above an existing outlet. I didn't want to re-wire the room not because I don't like wiring, but because I didn't want to get into drywall work with this project. I planned on one outlet remaining in place and being accessible from the cabinet back for my giant printer. This is the outlet that is right next to the tub access door. This is also where the power for my new floating shelf outlet came from. I wanted at least one outlet above the counter top for my other printer. Unlike a kitchen where the NEC specifies how many out lets are needed along a counter this is not a kitchen so I didn't install outlets all over the place above the counter. Just one. The issue is that to do that I spliced new wire into an existing outlet and the NEC requires that splices be in a box and accessible. It wouldn't be too accessible if there was a cabinet and counter top permanently installed in front of it. I wanted to follow the code in this case so I could get to the splices if needed. I based the cabinet layout design so that the outlets in question would be in the no mans land beside the cabinet along the 45 degree wall. That was part of the solution, but that would still make them inaccessible even if they were no blocked by a cabinet, they would still be in a void under the counter top. I toyed with the idea of trying to cut access holes in the cabinets, but that wouldn't work and was discarded. I came up with a solution that I thought was clever. I decided I would make the counter on the 45 degree wall hinged so it opened like a toy box lid. With the counter lifted up the empty spaces between the cabinets would be accessible and so would the outlets. At least theoretically.

I had other issue to solve first though before I sorted the details of how to make and install a hinged counter top.

The flooring I was going to install is from Cali Bamboo and is a gray colored click lock type of floor. link. I installed the same type of floor (different color) in our guest room last year when I tackled that room and liked it. I needed to remove the carpet and install a hard floor in my son's room to make it easier for his chair to roll around, so I ordered enough to do his room and my office with the same stuff. The two rooms are connected through his bathroom sorts jack and jill style so having matching floors seemed like it would work out well. I did his room first so I had the flooring for my office a couple months before i needed it. When I bought the floor, I ordered enough for the entire room and closet and that was long before I had considered doing any type of built in cabinets. The floor is a floating install and I was wary about installing it in the entire room and them placing the cabinets on top of it since that would impede the floatiness of the floor and I didn't want to lock it in and risk it buckling. The internet told me it was either not an issue at all or could be a real issue. In the end, I figured it would probably be ok to place the cabinets on the floor, but didn't want to risk having them buckle or anything like that. I also did not want to have to install quarter round around my cabinets to cover the expansion gap. This was a bit of a head scratcher. I ended up installing ply wood pieces to the subfloor that were shimmed to be level and about 1/16" higher than the height that the finished floor was going to be. Where the cabinets had a finsihed face (fronts and exposed ends) I made some plywood pieces that I glued to the cabinet bottoms so they could rest on the new pieces and allow the flooring to extend under the finished edges without the cabinets actually resting on the floor. Read about it on this old house as an option and it worked out great.

I also added larger pieces of plywood under where the desk legs were going to be so the weight of them plus the desktop would be transferred down to the subfloor vertically and not put a lot of strain the the cabinet joints where the cabinet bottom connected to the fronts backs and sides. I didn't want to stress those dado and glue joints like that.