Tabula Rasa

For some time, Stephanie's been wanting something like a coffee table for the living room to use instead of a series of tiny folding tables which get moved into and out of the room as necessary. After, at long last, looking at the design of some mid-century modern tables, I realized that building such a thing would be remarkably easy. And it was.

Table, with dog for scale.

I started with a couple of sheets of plywood (a thin birch piece for the surface, a thicker pine one for the underside). I scribed a triangle on the surface, used a couple of old paint cans to draw curves into the corners, clamped them together, and cut out the shape with the usual jig saw.

Using a little simple geometry, I found the center of the triangle constituting the lower piece, drew some lines out from there towards the corners, and put the brackets for the legs about two thirds of the way out from the center towards each corner. I used angled brackets for the legs, and cut the ends of the legs at a matching ten-degree angle. Doing the top and bottom as separate pieces conveniently allowed me to drill through the bottom piece without worrying about marring the top.

Once that was done, I glued the top and bottom parts together (clamped together for about a day), put iron-on birch trim around the edges and trimmed it back, stained it a reddish-brown (sorta mirroring the living room's largely red color scheme), and put on lots and lots of coats of polyurethane finish, occasionally sanding between coats.

Helpful scale dog provides scale.

The result is, it appears, a nicely stylish table, sized and colored to suit the room it's in, which cost maybe $75, with the manufactured legs and brackets being the most expensive components. Once I get the CNC mill going, I may experiment with smaller side tables in the same style, but with some Atomic Age inlay.

Office Space

For reasons which can be summed up as "corporate reorganization," I suddenly acquired the need to be able to work from home full time with multiple computers. We've had space in the semi-finished attic which we had hoped to turn into a home office, but it's the most remote part of the attic, and it's packed solid with boxes, so that's not likely to happen any time soon, so I have to work with the space I've got.

The most accessible space we have at the moment is the vaguely retro-styled lounge, furnished in part with a few vintage mid-century pieces I inherited from my grandmother. A typical desk in that room would both take up more space than I'd like and clash horribly with the rest of the room (and would doubtless cost significantly more than the solution I ended up with). What to do?

Well, if you look over here at one of the record players, you'll see a panel of pin-ups behind it (reproductions salvaged from some recent calendars and pasted onto a panel).

Rolling the record player out of the way, the pin-ups and a couple of fold-out panels are hinged to a frame holding everything to the wall.

The lower panels fold out as supports for the fold-down panel of pin-ups, which in turn...

...folds out into a 6' x 2' workspace, using piano hinges in grooves sunk into the panels with the router. I still need to run some cables and improve the lighting, which I'll be doing over the next few days. Some day, I'd like to surface the desk better, but since I'll be WFH full-time starting in a week, that's not an option these days.