Begin Again.
For the past year and several months, I’ve been working at ReadyMade, editing stories about DIY projects and cruising the internets in search of things that other people made.
One of the projects that I liked enough to want to attempt myself someday was the black pipe furniture that Mike Perry and his office-mates built for their new workspace in the Monti building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
(Building A Desk from Michael Perry on Vimeo.)
In a cheaply ironic fashion, my year of covering the DIY world left me with little time to make things on my own. But I’m changing gears now, getting ready to shove off on an almost year-long writing and research project—and getting back into the swing of working in my own space, too.
In the course of rearranging home to make room for this mental project, I finally took on a physical one: I designed and built my own desk from ¾-inch black plumbing pipe and a section of Ikea Numerar countertop (solid oak version).
Part of the inspiration was the need for a desk that would fit into an odd space that was constrained by a radiator. Done!
In the final tally, it took five trips to hardware and plumbing stores, one trek to Ikea, ample opportunities to remember how ridiculously heavy solid oak is, several anxious moments with a wrench, and more money than I would have guessed in the beginning, but this is it. It’s done. It’s sturdy. I love it. And I’m already planning design updates. (Made the center bar too high. It could have been an ideal footrest.)
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