holiday week butcher block

I have one more thing I want to work on this year, specifically before my next session of classes start for grad school. B/c I'm going to need a better place to work late at night than the couch, so why not put together a better desk with some holiday time. Although I'm not sure waiting until this week makes getting it done possible at all...

The first project I ever really worked on was a writing table to replace our crappy ikea desk at the condo, and it's been in our office room since the move. All it is is two reclaimed boards glued together with some table legs holding it up, stained and sealed for a functional surface. I thought about taking it apart and re-doing that joint in the middle, but really I need more room than the table currently offers. When I have a paper due, I like to spread out and have sources all over the place, and I can't do that right now. To help with this, I envisioned a wider table spanning most of that wall, with some bottom shelves to stash stuff on.

Things have come a long way since this table came together (thankfully).

I've been toying with the idea of putting together a big butcher block to have everything on, something I could do myself for as cheaply as possible. I love seeing all the examples of people building legs to hold up a block they've bought for $300 somewhere, but as much as they look cool I'm not dropping that kind of cash right now. As luck would have it, I just happened to have $100 store credit at HD, and about $25 in rebates for Menards, so why not go pick up some materials and a new tool or two to see what I can come up with.

Turns out I could do a lot. For about $30 out of pocket, I picked up

A ryobi power hand planer
2 36" clamps
9 8' 2x4's
2 1/2" 2x4' plywoods

Plenty to get started putting a desktop together. That's about as much of a plan as I needed.

So with some extra time off I got to cutting, gluing, and clamping. The 2x4's got the rounded edges cut off, then split into 2 1.5 inch halves. Those got chopped into random lengths, and then I started laying out how to put them together with the nicest looking grains I could find.

Trimmed

Halved. So much saw dust out.

Hey, this might actually work.

I started on the workbench but had to move to the floor eventually b/c I wanted to build out to around 30" deep. At this point I was getting a little worn down; it was a lot of repetitive tasks to get to where I could start gluing. But this was all one day's work, which made me feel really good about how much progress I was able to make. Time is running pretty short these days, so being able to go from raw materials to this far into the project in one workday was great.

Technically I should have flipped it at this point but I was done

I should probably build some nicer legs for something with this much work, but honestly re-using the old legs is going to be enough of a time saver it will be worth it. The plywood is to build a cabinet with that will serve as legs on one side of the table or maybe even two, but when I have time to put that together is anyone's guess at this point. I have until mid-January before classes start, I think I can get this done.