Building Desk And Storage Shelves [Now Finished]

[MxWinters]

The other day I posted a reply to the Stroage and Sorting LEGO thread showing my plans for a building desk and storage shelves for my LEGO collection. Considering that this is a big DIY project I thought I post a seperate topic showing my progress. Incase you didn't see my post in the other topic and due to some of the details in my other post having changed from my original plans, I figured I would repost the updated details in this thread.

The desk will be made from 18mm plywood and will be 1650mm long, 533mm wide and 660mm high. The shelving will be made from 12mm ply and will have 28 shelves, each shelf will be 801mm long and 150mm wide. Total height of desk and shelving unit will be 2262mm. I am also going to build a wall unit to give me extra shelves which will be 825mm long, 150mm wide and 1120mm high. The main shelving unit on the desk will hold 168 plastic food containers and the wall unit will hold another 60 containers giving a total of 228. Each shelf on the desk and wall unit will be angled at roughly 15° and they have an edging strip to stop the containers sliding out. I have added a piece of offcut in the centre of the desk shelving unit at the top that sticks out to fit a worklight as this unit will be in the corner of my living room which isn't that well lite. My Dad had a spare LED batten light fixture that will be screwed to this bracket. I have also added a L-shaped section under the desk for my 1x1 storage bricks that I have all my Power Functions stuff in.


This image shows the SketchUp drawing of what I'm building. Ignore the different coloured textures in this image, I have coloured them like this as the SketchUp file also contains a cutting plan of each sheet and the different colours help me to know which part is what. The desk, shelves and wall unit will be painted gloss white to match my computer and electronics desks.


The image shows part of my LEGO collection stored in plastic food containers which will be placed on the shelves and wall unit. Still have loads of parts that still need sorting as you can see to the right of the photo.

Hope you don't mind me creating a new topic but this is a big DIY job and I felt it should have it's own thread.
Plenty more updates to come.

Edited July 19, 2019 by MxWinters

[MxWinters]

Dad and I had a day free yesterday so we went to B&Q and picked up the 18mm sheet of plywood needed for the desk part.


We got B&Q to cut the sheets of plywood and here is all the pieces laid out. We had a couple of offcuts not pictured here. The long pieces against the wall is for the wall unit.

The desk is built and ready for painting.

Side-ish view of the desk.

Base coat of emulsion paint applied.

I've started painting the desk in white gloss but since the it takes 16 hours to dry, it will take a couple of days to apply 2 coats need and for it to dry properly. Once the gloss painting is done on the desk, Ill post another update.

[weeble1688]

Looking great so far - can't wait to see it ready for use!  Best of luck getting the paint to dry nicely; here on the east coast of America, it's so humid I doubt anything would dry properly

[Merlict]

Looks great. 

I'd prefer drawers with clear fronts rather than tubs with fiddly lids to remove but good on your for DIYing it.

[knotian]

I use tubs for my secondary storage and in your design you don't have to leave the lids on.

[corasaur]

Ohh it's like a window into my own future when I have the space to build a lego work station. So cool.

[MxWinters]

23 hours ago, weeble1688 said:

Looking great so far - can't wait to see it ready for use!  Best of luck getting the paint to dry nicely; here on the east coast of America, it's so humid I doubt anything would dry properly

Thanks , Although I live less than 2 miles from the coast (as the crow flies) thus we never get low hunidity levels, when the weather is hot like it has been recently, paint will dry fine. The emulsion base coat only took bout 20 minutes to completely dry. Gloss paint is obviously takes much longer but is does dry fine here. 
 

18 hours ago, Merlict said:

Looks great. 

I'd prefer drawers with clear fronts rather than tubs with fiddly lids to remove but good on your for DIYing it.

 

8 hours ago, knotian said:

I use tubs for my secondary storage and in your design you don't have to leave the lids on.

Thanks for your kind words.
Indeed, when I'm building something, I will take the lids off and leave them off. But during extending periods when I'm not building (e.g. longer than a month), I will put the lids back on to protect my collection from dust. I'm not bothered if a little bit of dust gets onto my parts from overnight but I don't want huge amounts of dust to get on them.

I normally perfer to DIY stuff like this instead of buying it as I can build it exactly as I want. Tis the same with my computer desk, my electronics desk and my hamster cage, I designed and built them all to suit my needs instead of buying overpriced factory products that may not offer the features I want/need. Building stuff like this always gives you the satisfaction knowing that you designed and built it from scratch.

I did look at buying a load of plastic storage draw units but the total cost of them for the amount I need would have been almost double the price of this solution. Plus with the number of some parts like 2L fiction pins I have, I would have had to use like 3 or 4 draws to store them in. Using these plastic food containers, I can fit all my 2L friction pins in one tub.
 

5 hours ago, corasaur said:

Ohh it's like a window into my own future when I have the space to build a lego work station. So cool.

Lol glad you like it. Feel free to copy my design if you want to build something similer. I will post the SketchUp file when I know I haven't made any errors in it.

Edited July 7, 2019 by MxWinters

[MxWinters]

I got my LEGO building desk painted and is now inplace in the corner of my living room.

I'm yet to fit the L-shaped shelf on the right side for my 1x1 storage bricks. I'm also going to put a small shelf on the left side for my landline phone and WiFi router.

Dad and I are going to start building the shelfing unit and wall unit on Friday.

[neonic]

Your own workspace in the livingroom, that's cool.
I guess pink is your favourite color 

You got also interesting hobbies I've seen, a woman to my heart, I have to find one my self.
Good luck with your build. One question ... maybe I haven't seen/read it but won't your forget a nice light on your workspace ? Could me handy, maybe a cool ledstrip (with changeable colors...)

[MxWinters]

2 minutes ago, neonic said:

Your own workspace in the livingroom, that's cool.
I guess pink is your favourite color 

You got also interesting hobbies I've seen, a woman to my heart, I have to find one my self.
Good luck with your build. One question ... maybe I haven't seen/read it but won't your forget a nice light on your workspace ? Could me handy, maybe a cool ledstrip (with changeable colors...)

This is my third desk I've built for my living room. One for my computer, one as my electronics workbench and now one for my LEGO. I perfer to build desks to my specs rather than buying factory made desks, it normally works out much cheaper to build your own.
Pink is my second favorite colour, purple is my first but my landlord would make me repaint the room like 5 times when I move if I painted my living room dark purple.
Lol I love anything technical. I'm not into pink fluffy unicorns (or ignorant horses as I call them), more stage lighting, LEGO and engineering in general.

Thanks alot 
Yeah Ill be adding a light to it, I mentioned it in my first post:

On 7/5/2019 at 9:01 PM, MxWinters said:

 I have added a piece of offcut in the centre of the desk shelving unit at the top that sticks out to fit a worklight as this unit will be in the corner of my living room which isn't that well lite. My Dad had a spare LED batten light fixture that will be screwed to this bracket.

If you look at the SketchUp image I posted in the first post, you'll see the gray and white light at the top of the shelving unit.


This is the LED strip my Dad gave me that will go on the bracket at the top of the shelving unit. I had to remove and resolder a different cable on it as the wire it came with was only about 8inch long. It also, rather stupidly, didn't have an earth bond. This cable is a 3 core and I modified the light fixture to have a proper CPC bond. My parents have one of these in their utility room which lights up the entire room so it will be bright enough for my building desk. This light is not colour changing, it just has warm white (3000K) LED's. Its a worklight, so I don't see the point of using an RGB light on it.

[LucyCol]

Looking good, one thing i would suggest is a small cut out at the bottom of the legs to go around the skirting board and allow the the desk to be flush against the wall, i amazed at the amount that falls down the gap on my desk.

[MxWinters]

9 hours ago, LucyCol said:

Looking good, one thing i would suggest is a small cut out at the bottom of the legs to go around the skirting board and allow the the desk to be flush against the wall, i amazed at the amount that falls down the gap on my desk.

Thanks. Initially I was going to do that, however when the shelving unit is build, the front of the bottom shelf will rest on the desk which will prevent any parts from falling down the back of the shelf. There is a small gap between the desk and the wall on the right side caused by the skirting board but most of my building will take place in the centre and left side so I'm not too worried about that, I could either move the right side leg inward by ~20mm or place a wood strip on that right side to prevent any parts falling down. I will keep an eye on this and deside whether it is needed or not. I do need to make a cutout on the back support brace for my telephone and WiFi router's power supplies which I couldn't do until I fitted the desk as I didn't know the size that the cutout needed to be. Ill likely do that over the weekend.

Edited July 12, 2019 by MxWinters

[MxWinters]

As planned, Dad and I went down to B&Q in Penryn today (friday) to get the wood for the shelving units. They were kind enough to cut the two 2440x1220 sheets down to the sizes we need completely free of charge. They normally limit you to 15 free cuts then charge ~0.50GBP per cut thereafter.


All this wood is 12mm hardwood plywood. The four long pieces are for the desk shelving unit uprights. The big stack are the 38 shelves, the single small piece is the bracket for the worklight shown in a previous update.


To ensure all the shelves have consistant spacing between them and they are all at a 15° angle, I designed this jig to make building the shelving units easier and quicker.


This shows how the jig worked. We did one unit then had tea (or supper) and then built the other unit, the second unit took 24 minutes from start to finish to build thanks to this jig.


This is a shot of the first 5 shelves on the first unit. The first (closest to the camera), the eighth and the fourteenth shelf are screwed in, the rest are attached with 30mm long panel pins (small nails).
We never noticed this when we built the unit, but only when uploading these images, you can spot one nail has missed the shelf, we will correct this tomorrow. Lining up the nails and screws to the shelves was the trickiest part of building these shelving units. I think the one of the second shelve was the only one we messed up but I will double check tomorrow.


Here is one of the desk mounted shelving units built.
After I took this photo, we put the two units next to each other just to see what they would look like, they are much better than I thought they would.

My Dad is working until 1400 tomorrow (sat) so when he gets home and has chance to chill out for a bit, we are going to build the final shelving unit which will be mounted to the wall. We still need to get the edging strips to go on each shelf to stop the food containers sliding out, but since we need something like 30 meters of the stuff, we won't do that tomorrow. Sunday we have a family get-together so the edging strips won't be done until sometime next week.

I will post another short update tomorrow for the wall unit.
Anyways, hope you like them as much as I do .

[Vindicare]

This is great. If I sorted by pieces, I would definitely steal this idea. It’s fun watching the build process. 

[MxWinters]

5 hours ago, Vindicare said:

This is great. If I sorted by pieces, I would definitely steal this idea. It’s fun watching the build process. 

Thanks, glad you like it. Feel free to steal my design, I have to make a couple of small corrections to the SketchUp drawing as I didn't allow for the thickness of the saw blade in it. Once I've corrected it, Ill share the SketchUp file so you can build it yourself if you wanted

[knotian]

mxwinters

Lookin' good. You might want to make a real simple addition to your desk. If you have some scrap wood. Cut a thin strip and glue/nail it to all edges of the table, so the edge has a lip of about 1/8". I've done this on both of my building tables and have saved tons of time that I used to spend bending over and looking on the floor for pieces. 

[MxWinters]

6 hours ago, knotian said:

mxwinters

Lookin' good. You might want to make a real simple addition to your desk. If you have some scrap wood. Cut a thin strip and glue/nail it to all edges of the table, so the edge has a lip of about 1/8". I've done this on both of my building tables and have saved tons of time that I used to spend bending over and looking on the floor for pieces. 

That's a good idea, I might do that at some point. Won't be for a while though, getting everything built and painted, getting all my parts sorted and putting labels on all the bins is the most important. Once that is all done that I may do that, thanks for the tip .

[MxWinters]

Time for another update on my progress. As I said in my last update, we missed the shelf with a nail on the second shelf on the first unit. We have now corrected that. Out of 116 nails we used to attach the 29 shelves we nailed, we only mess up 6, but since they were small thin nails, after we pulled them out and redid them. you wouldn't notice anything. Out of 36 screws used on 9 shelves, we messed up 1 of them, but again, one would never know looking at that shelf. Considering neither Dad nor I are carpenters, I don't think we did too badly.

Dad and I built the third and final shelving unit today which will be mounted on the wall. In total, all three shelving units took less than 1.5 hours to build including glueing, nailing/screwing and fixing the ones we messed up thanks to the jig I showed you in my last update. I'd hate to think how long these shelving units would have taken if we built them manually.


This is a shot of all three shelving units next to each other after we gave them a base coat of emulsion paint.


This photo is of some extra pieces we cut, from left to right:
Worklight bracket to be attached to the top and in the centre of the desk shelving units,
Telephone and WiFi router shelf to go under the desk on the left side,
The two right hand pieces are for a L-shaped shelf for my 1x1 storage bricks (where I store my Power Functions stuff in) to go under the desk on the right side (we need to cut the right most piece down to the length of the second from right, something we forgot to do today).

The next step is to repaint all these parts with white gloss paint like we did with the desk. I hate painting with gloss paint so this next step is going to suck, especially the shelves due to the limited space between each shelf (100mm).

It is unlikely that I will post any updates for the next 2-3 days. As I said in my last update, we have a family get-together and BBQ tomorrow so I doubt Ill get much gloss painting done tomorrow and since gloss takes ages to dry, it will be at least Tusday before all the shelving units are dry.

Edited July 13, 2019 by MxWinters

[MxWinters]

Time for another update, although just a mini update this time. I was able to get a little bit of gloss painting done on Sunday but because my nieces were running around all over the place, I didn't trust them not to touch the shelving units while the paint was drying so I only got half of the wall unit painted. I wasn't able to get anything done yesterday (Monday) but I did manage to get the first coat of gloss done today on the tops of the shelves. I am going over to my parents again tomorrow to give the top surfaces a second coat and then give the bottom the the shelves its first coat. Half way though painting today I ran out of gloss paint so I popped over to B&Q to get another tin. While I was there I picked up 5 of the 13 shelf edging strips I needed, These will go on the front of each shelf to stop the food containers sliding off the shelf.


B&Q sell these in 2400mm lengths, this photo is after cutting them down to 800mm, the length of the shelves.


These strips are 21mm wide and 4mm thick. Once nailed onto the shelves, there will be 9mm flange above the shelf that the containers will rest on. I haven't desided if I will gloss these pieces or not yet, it depends on how they look unpainted when I test fit them onto the shelving units. I want to avoid painting them if I can but it might look daft if I leave them unpainted, Ill figure that out tomorrow.
Sorry that the second image is a little out of focus.

I will try to post another quick update tomorrow once I have given the top surfaces a second coat and the bottom surfaces its first coat. I will get the bottom surfaces repainted on Thursday and I am hoping to get the shelving units fitted on Friday as that's the last chance Ill get unit next Wednesday.

[MxWinters]

Just a quicky, I have now finished the gloss painting in the smaller wall unit and have almost finished the gloss painting on the desk shelving units. I just have the underside of the shelves to paint now. I'v always hated gloss paint and I hate it even more now but the shelves do look good so at least my perseverance is paying off.


I haven't bothered to paint the back of the shelving unit as they will be fixed to the wall so there was no point. I have also not painted the front of the shelves as there will be those edging strips nailed to them. The edging strips I have desided not to paint. I kinda like the pine on white contrast.

Ill post another quick update tomorrow again once I have finished the painting and have attached the edging strips. While I was over my parents today painting, I arranged for my Dad to come over on Friday to install the shelving units and fit the small shelves under the desk for my 1x1 storage bricks and my telephone/router.

[neonic]

Looking good. Also looks like you got a lot of Lego.
I was wondering ... are the shelf's not going to bend down after awhile? I know, Lego doesn't weight much, but it's pretty wide.

[MxWinters]

20 minutes ago, neonic said:

Looking good. Also looks like you got a lot of Lego.
I was wondering ... are the shelf's not going to bend down after awhile? I know, Lego doesn't weight much, but it's pretty wide.

Thanks you so much .
Yeah I have a decent amount of LEGO. What you see in the second image of my first post of this topic is about 60% of what I own, I have sorted most of my Technic stuff out now, I also have about 1900 parts on my artic lorry and all my system bricks from when I was a child (which I never use now). That said, one can never have too much LEGO and my collection is growing all the time .

Each shelf is 800mm (31.49inch) long and can hold 6 plastic containers so there is not a huge weight on each shelf, however they may warp downward a little but I wouldn't think they would bend too much, this is why I didn't go for MDF which is much cheap and chose 12mm hardwood ply. It was the more expensive option but its less likely to bow over time. I have the option to add a piece of 2x1inch batten at the back of each unit with a 15° slot cut into it if the bowing becomes an issue later on. This is one of those things I have to try out and see if it becomes an issue, if so I can come up with ways to fix and reverse the bowing.

[MxWinters]

Time for the penultimate update to this build. Today I finished all the gloss painting on the bigger shelving units ready for installation tomorrow. Since I finished the painting on the wall unit yesterday and it is now dried, I decided to nail on the edging strip and bring it back to my flat so we had more space in Dad's car for the desk shelving units.


Once I got it home, I put the wall unit on the desk to so I could see how it would look and to test fit the plastic containers.


Here is a close-up shot of a selection of tubs placed onto the shelf to give you an idea of what is will look like once it is complete.


I actually have two different sizes of these containers, 250ml and 500ml. For those parts where I have too many to fit into one container, I can stack a 250ml and 500ml, just like in this image, this is part of the reason why I decided to make the spacing between each shelf more than was need.

Last night after posting the my reply to @neonic regarding warping on the shelving units, it got me thinking. While that issue may or may not happen on the shelves given the fullness of time, I realised that the desk unit would be the most likely part to start warping due to the weight of the two large shelving units as they are quite heavy and there is nothing under the desk to prevent any warping. Thus I decided to add a couple of steel L-shaped brackets under the desk in the center of each shelving unit. Although one metal bracket may be enough to stop the desk from warping, I cannot do that due to there being an electrical socket on the centre. I obviously don't want to BBQ myself with 230VAC and my landlord would freak out if I drill holes into the building's electrical system so if I add two brackets in the centre under each shelving unit, this should stop any warping and prevent a BBQ'ed Morgan. Thanks to neonic for bringing up the warping issue .

My Dad will be coming over tomorrow to help me install everything. We should have everything done by mid afternoon, so as soon as we've finished, I will post the final update to this build.

[TurboBrick]

Quote

We got B&Q to cut the sheets of plywood and here is all the pieces laid out.

First of all, this is a fantastic design and it looks great!  

About the wood cuts: does B&Q provide this as a regular service and is it free of charge? Also, did you provide written/verbal instructions or did you just send them a SketchUp file containing the info? 
We don't have B&Q, but I'm curious to how this works and hope to find a local service for this.

Quote

Thus I decided to add a couple of steel L-shaped brackets under the desk in the center of each shelving unit

This is probably a good idea in the long run, especially two even if not to avoid the outlet.  (Plus stability when moving.)

Looking forward to the final result!

[MxWinters]

2 hours ago, TurboBrick said:

First of all, this is a fantastic design and it looks great!  

About the wood cuts: does B&Q provide this as a regular service and is it free of charge? Also, did you provide written/verbal instructions or did you just send them a SketchUp file containing the info? 
We don't have B&Q, but I'm curious to how this works and hope to find a local service for this.

This is probably a good idea in the long run, especially two even if not to avoid the outlet.  (Plus stability when moving.)

Looking forward to the final result!

Thanks alot, I'm glad you like it.

Yes, B&Q provide the cutting service for pretty much all wood you buy from them, you can get them to cut a massive sheet like we did, or just a single cut on a length of 1x1 batten. Yes the cutting service is free for the first 15 cuts, after that they normally charge about 0.50GBP per cut over the 15 free cuts. However when we got them to cut the 2 12mm plywood sheets, we went way over the 15 cuts but they didn't charge us for it. The 0.50GBP per cut thing is one of those things that is depends on the mood of the person cutting the wood. Sometimes they charge, other times they don't.
As for the cutting plan. I printed off a birds-eye view screenshot from SketchUp (see below), marked out all the measurements of each piece I needed and handed that to them. We also wrote on the paper the order of cuts, e.g 1st cut, 2nd cut ect. The person who cut the wood was able understand what we wanted and cut everything perfectly. We did the same thing for the other 2 sheets of plywood.


Hope that helps. Anything other questions just let me know.

Indeed, I am grateful to @neonic for rasing the warping issue so I could put these brackets under the desk. Thanks again for that neonic .

I shall be posting the final update to this in a minute so chances are by the time you read this, there will be another update below .