Category: Hobby

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The 200 Year Old Barge Wood Desk

I have been wanting to build a new desk using some barge wood ever since my non-fishing trip to Florida. I picked up the barge wood from BroMike on the way home. Here is a link to the post showing and explaining the barge wood. Check it out.

The plan was to put together two of the 18 inch boards to make the top slab of the desk. This would make the slab 36 inches deep – lots of room.  Issue is that I wanted an 8 foot wide desk so I can spread things out. Also, the bigger the better. We had to prep the boards by removing some of the old nails and fixing some of the splits by gluing the boards. and applying pressure. We had cut the boards down from 12 feet to 6 feet for transport. I did not think that far ahead to cut them to 8 feet – I wish I had. So we used a 6 foot board and a 2 foot extension to make up each of the now 8 foot boards.

Picture below is the prep to cut the two foot extensions. Got to use my classic Craftsman circular saw and was reminded that you should use larger teeth on thicker wood.

Here is the desk slab laid out on the garage floor before putting it all together.

We then placed the 2 newly made 8 foot boards together with lots of pocket hole screws.  Here is the finished slab. It isn’t perfectly square (on purpose) due to the variations in the boards. I left the natural edges on because I like the look.

For the base of the desk we used 4×6’s for the four corners and 2×6’s for everything else. I built in some lower corner shelves for speakers and will probably add more features later as I use the desk.

I also dado cut the 4×6’s so that the 2×6’s would sit inside the legs giving it a cleaner look. Here is the frame before staining.

No beers were harmed during the making of this desk. A few were consumed, but they were not harmed.

I then had an epiphany – I should probably clean the slab before we actually use it. I sprayed down the slab and removed quite a lot of dirt. I then had ANOTHER epiphany and decided a slight clear coat would be a good idea.

noun epiph·a·ny \i-ˈpi-fə-nē\ – a (1) :  a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something (2) :  an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking (3) :  an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure. (4): your wife telling you to do something you didn’t initially want to do but ended up being a pretty smart thing to do.
Here is the slab after a good frothing with water, a long drying spell and a simple clear coat.
Here is the finished desk before moving it into the office:
And here is the desk in its permanent spot:

I will probably need to mount more than a few surge suppressors to the back and add some wire management but I love the look of it so far. It is quite a large and beefly looking man-computer-desk!

Here is a close up showing the texture of the slab:

Now I just need a name….