With the bathroom renovation fully underway, I couldn’t put off building the vanity any longer. Almost two years ago, I selected the design to generally rip off. Shortly thereafter, I purchased who knows how many board feet of 8/4 quartersawn white oak, which then sat in my workshop to acclimate for many months before dimensioning.

White Oak can be very beautiful and (being both waterproof and tough) it is perfect for applications like bathroom vanities. Hard Maple works well too. But unless it’s air dried, White Oak is just too damned hard to work with hand tools alone. Based on how tough it is (and the way it warped when acclimating in the shop), I assume this stock is kiln dried. So I didn’t even bother trying to chop the mortises by hand. Instead, I utilized the drill press like a mortising machine and pared each mortise to width with a chisel. I also squared the corners, because effort.

The tenons were no peach either. I typically saw tenon shoulders and then split the tenons cheeks (rather than saw them). A router plane then pares down the cheeks to get a piston fit. This approach works pretty well, even in kiln dried White Oak, as long as I don’t take too much of a bite with the router plane. But fine-tuning the tenon shoulders (i.e., end grain) with a shoulder plane is basically impossible. If I don’t saw perfectly to the line, it’s chisel paring or bust.

So after getting through the joinery on both end frames, I was ready for a change. Back to the Eastern White Pine standing desk I’m leisurely making for my home office! If you’ve been reading for any amount of time, you know that I prefer to torture myself with angled back legs and this desk build is no exception.

Why Eastern White Pine for desk, you may ask? Well, it’s my experience that a softer wood with a bit of flex is better in the long run for hands and elbows. I’ve been working on a quartersawn red oak desk for about five years now and I’m pretty sure I have arthritis in one elbow because of it. I’ve taken to using gel rests for both keyboard and mouse, but they don’t do anything to make up for the lack of flex.

These frames are only 34″ high overall (and will likely be down to 33.5″ when the feet are leveled). Add in two inches of bearer and two more inches of tabletop, and perhaps 3/8 of felt furniture pad, it’s still only about 38″ high. At just a bit over 5’10”, a perfect standing desk for me is about 40″ high. So where am I getting the rest of the height? From my ventilated laptop stand, of course!

The final desk won’t be quite as long or as wide as my current desk. I don’t work from home nearly as much as I used to, so there is just no good reason for a 76″ x 30″ desk. It takes up too much space. Something more like 60″ x 20″ will be plenty of real estate and will free up a fair amount of floor space.

But this new standing desk will make my current office chair pretty useless, so I need to find a decent 30″ stool with a backrest.

Find or make, I guess.

JPG