So a couple of months ago my father and I were down in the basement of my house, putting some of the summer stuff away, and in a pile of dusty, disused furniture in the corner, we discovered the top from the dining room table we had when I was a kid. This was an unexpected find, because we
never lived in this house when I was a kid; it belonged to my mother's second husband's mother, who's only been dead since 2003. It turned out Mom had stashed the table down there anyway because the basement over here is easier to get into than the one in her house, or some such, and then forgot that it was down there.
Dad and I looked it over; it was in pretty good shape, a bit scuffed up around the edges and missing its legs, but the inlaid blue tiles in the middle were all intact (the idea, when Dad built it, was that you could put hot serving dishes and stuff in the middle without using a trivet, because it was made from the same tiles as our kitchen counters - what the hell, we had a box of them left over) and the edges could be touched up. We agreed that it would be a real shame to leave it down there to rot in the mildewy dark, but what to do with it? Neither of us needed a dining room table and, in any case, my kitchen's much too small for this one...
... but, it suddenly occurred to me, the desk I'd been using for the last couple of years is much too small. The kneehole is all of 18 inches across and the top is so small I had to turn my printer sideways to fit it. I
had a really nice big L-shaped glass-and-steel-tubing desk, bought when I worked at the
Times, but that was taken away when I had the Brain Adventure and Mom thought I might fall on it or something.
So I said, only half-joking, "We could make a heck of a big desk out of it."
So earlier this month, in a couple of long sessions of amateur cabinetry, we did. It took a few days to get three decent coats of polyurethane on the new bits, but today the varnish was dry and the weather was good, so Dad brought it up and we moved out my tiny old desk and set the new one up in its place.
( Picture behind here. )It's terrific. Not quite perfect - as you can probably infer from the photo, it's a trifle too large for the space that it's in - I can't get to those bookcases behind it now, though a person of more moderate arsewidth could probably manage it - but we have the beginnings of a notion for how to rearrange the rest of the room later to give it a bit more leeway. And it's so deep that I couldn't actually set the computer up in the opening we designed for it, inside the left "leg", because the wires for the stuff that goes on top (keyboard, etc.) wouldn't reach all the way to the back and then to the front again. But it's just the right height, it's got
acres of room underneath it (it's such a strange feeling to be sitting with
both knees under the desk), and look at those drawers! (And the little cubbyholes for blank 5" discs and a ream of paper; I love the paper storage thing, that was Dad's idea.) I can either get some extension cables for the peripherals or just leave the computer on top and put a wastebasket in there.
And - and I think, when we're done talking, this is what I'm fondest of - it's our old dining room table, which we hardly ever actually ate at but which did a lot of service as a general work table from when I was, oh, I don't know, seven or so right through to my first year in college. Under the touched-up stain and varnish on the top, one can still see impressions in the wood from where I bore down a bit hard doing homework there, and the odd splotch of carelessly dripped model paint. My keyboard is set up right about where I used to sit to build model kits and rockets. I don't wish to be too sentimental about this, but I'm afraid I'm quite sentimental about this. :)
(Oh, and if you're wondering why we didn't stain the new parts to match the top - well, look at how pretty that pine is. I couldn't bear to cover that up. Anyway, not to be too Christopher Lowell about it, I think the contrast works nicely. Keeps it from looking too... I dunno,
heavy. Although it
is quite heavy, I mean, the top is two layers of plywood, pine boards for trim, and about 1200 square inches of grouted ceramic tile.)
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