Lately Nick and I have been busy fixing up our house to modernize it and make it our own. I already showed you our beautiful dining room. Now, we have moved on to the office.

Part of our office remodel included getting new desks. My current desk is really cute, but incredibly unstable. It’s always scary to have a drink on the desk. Just typing causes the it to wobble. It also is too small to accommodate my second monitor.

We love the butcher block look, so we went on a hunt to find some nice looking butcher block that was large enough, but not too large, and not incredibly expensive. It turns out that the butcher block at IKEA is exactly what we were looking for. I also got some cute legs there, and was so excited for my new desk. But sadly, the desk ended up being too wobbly for my tastes. So we returned the legs and went back to the drawing board.

Nick found a bunch of ideas online about building a desk using galvanized pipe. I was sold! How could piping not be incredibly sturdy? And it’s cute and lofty-looking. But this was an incredible fail for me. I did so much planning. I bought pipe and measured it and put a few pieces together to see how it fits and measured it to see how much of the length gets lost when you assemble it, and planned and priced…and failed.

When we bought the final pieces of pipe, I found out some important things that I did not know before. Pipe pieces are not all the exact same length. (I must have gotten lucky with the test pieces I bought.) Even if they are sold as ten inches, they might be a bit smaller or larger. And even though my test pipe all lost a half an inch when assembled, that does not mean that all of the pipe loses the same amount. My final product was not level, and needed too much work to get it to match exactly.

I also found out that I made my design way too complicated. I had too many connections and two rows of bars that had to screw in one direction on one side, and the opposite direction on the other side. I had found someone online who had a similar problem, and they told me to screw them in as far as you can on one side, and then unscrew them to attach the other side. This may have worked, but the quarter-inch size difference in the piping made one of the bars too loose.

I also had connections that needed to screw in to an exact placement. Which meant that the pipe was not screwed in as far as it could be, and it was wobbly and unstable…back to the drawing board!

We ended up giving up on the pipe desk and just bought stable desks that can go to sitting or standing. I’m much happier with the end result than what I think I would have been with the pipe desk, but the defeat was difficult to take. It looked so easy online…

I’ll post before and after pictures of the office next week. Stay tuned!