Thanks REI for the desks.

Back in July, REI held a giant warehouse sale. K didn't know what to expect. Still, her and a friend in town who also works remotely decided to check it out. On a Thursday, they headed out for the day. Mid-morning, I got a video call from K. She wanted me to check out some things she had found. Besides the Gore-Tex and 850-fill down jackets she picked up for $20, there was office furniture. Specifically, she mentioned a pile of butcher-block style desk slabs. 

Backing up a bit, we had been thinking of updating our office space to something more modern and built-in. We were both still rocking our pair of Pottery Barn desks and unmatched chairs. It worked, but I definitely longed for more desk space. 

A more ergonomic setup, too. Not knowing then exactly what we'd do with a six-foot by thirty-inch slab of wood, I told her to grab one. It was all of twenty bucks. 

When she got home, I took one look at it and exclaimed, "We need more." Based on the one, I quickly drew up some plans. The next day, Friday, we grabbed the kids and headed back over the mountains to Seattle. At the sale again, while I chatted with a fellow old-timer REI guy, K picked up two more slabs and a pair of nice rolling metal file cabinets.

Turns out, we think the office furniture is from the kiboshed REI campus build in 2018. As the story goes, before we moved to Wenatchee REI announced they were relocating its headquarters. To Bellevue, Washington. What for us had always been an easy three-minute walk to the train station, a relaxing twenty-minute train ride and then a quick vanshare ride to campus was going to become a two-plus-hour ordeal straight out of traffic hell. So yeah, we moved to Wenatchee. Fast-forward two years after that during the early days of Covid, REI sold their brand-spanking new campus to Facebook. They had never even moved in.

So they had some office equipment they were trying to offload. For cheap. Über cheap, actually. We got the three wood slabs and two cabinets for a grand total of eighty bucks. We promptly sold all of our Pottery Barn furniture to a really nice gal in town. Then I had some work to do.

The design I came up with was going to use the same desk layout of our office-slash-guest bedroom. Meaning, I'd build the desks into the same corner. We'd just have significantly more surface area than we had with the PB desks. Yes! The work started with clearing out the room and painting the trim black to match the rest of the trim we've been painting downstairs. That part was easy. In an afternoon, we went from white to black.

Then it was time to get to work on the slabs. What we discovered is that they're from a custom design furniture firm in LA called Mash Studios. REI certainly didn't spare any expense. We've seen the cheap butcher-block countertops at Home Depot and Ikea. These were not that. They're by my guess either solid walnut or solid oak. Either way, their heft backs up that claim. Each 72" x 30" slab must weigh close to a hundred pounds. REI had ordered them with a cutout for monitor stands and cables (along with the sit-stand motor drive button which they didn't have at the sale). Bottom line: these were very nice work surfaces. I joked we should have bought a few more just for fun. 

For our design, though, I needed to hack them. The goal was to keep as much length, and thus surface area, as possible. Also, to keep K and I from backing into each other as we sat in our respective spots. Given their weight, moving and cutting them by myself was a little bit of a challenge. First, I mitered opposite corners on two of the slabs.

The third slab would be the square connecting the two in the corner so I only used a 2' section. We have some leftover. To connect all three pieces, I broke out a biscuit joiner.

Since the desktops would be set against the wall, I also needed to cut them to fit around the window trim. I wanted to match the style of the existing stand and cable cutouts so I broke out a router. Of course, before doing the finish work with the router on inch-and-a-half thick solid oak (or walnut), I needed to remove as much material as possible. That took a combo of a circular saw and a jigsaw. I then cut a jig for the pattern bit to follow for the window cutout and taped it to the desktop.

From there it was a simple matter of following the jig. It took a couple of passes because my bit isn't quite as long as the wood is deep. After sanding and cleaning up the cut it looks really quite nice, I'm not gonna lie.

Then someone brought coffee!

If I haven't mentioned it enough, these were gorgeous slabs that were very well crafted. I almost felt bad cutting them, but knew we needed to fit our space. Evidence of the craftsmanship here is the joinery.

Wooing aside, I needed to switch gears to leveling and installing the wall blocks on which we'd mount the desktops.

As if getting these beautiful desktops for so cheap wasn't enough, we apparently bought a set of tabletop legs in the As-Is section at Ikea years ago. Also, for thirty bucks. They'd remarkably match our ten dollar white filing cabinets perfectly. Thank you, our past selves. Using one of them, I set the corner piece in place.

To hold the three slabs together, this is where the biscuit joints were necessary. I glued them and set my desktop in place.

Then K's. Underneath, I used pocket hole screws to secure the tops to the wall blocks.

Also at the REI sale, K picked us up a pair of very nice Humanscale Neat Tech cable organizers. I think they were five bucks each. I don't want to know what they cost retail. They were simple to install and meant we'd have a clean work space on and under our desks.

Finally, it was a matter of leveling the surfaces and setting the three Ikea legs in place. Then leveling each of them vertically. Unfortunately, REI wasn't selling office chairs. So K and I each picked one out from Branch. She went with the Softside and I opted for the Ergonomic.

The last step was moving in to our new space.

For fun, I finally built another frame for and hung our historic topographic print of the Wenatchee area. We're stoked to have so much more work surface combined with a more contemporary look. All for the grand total of about a hundred bucks. Thanks REI!