Back in 2011, I commandeered a chunk of the utility room to use as a home office. The main part of the job was puting in a new stud-partition wall, and the all-important door. Beyond that, there wasn’t too much to do. I moved some kitchen units, ripped up the floor-tiles, took out the built-in cupboard, and replaced it with a bit more insulation. Nothing too arduous or complicated was involved, but it did make quite a mess, of the floor and the walls. As we were getting another room plastered at the time, I had the guys give it a skim-coat. One cheap laminate floor later, I moved in the office furniture I’d already had in a bedroom upstairs, and it was ready to roll.
It’s not a big room, just over 2.2 by 2.6 m, but it did the job – both as a place of work, and – crucially – as a store-room for my retro distractions. Inevitably, as the years went by, I acquired more and more stuff. I tried to be sensible about what I kept in there, and avoid unnecessary ‘heaping’, but regardless of how ruthless (and ocassionally tidy) I was, there were certain things that just didn’t have a self-evident space. Important things like old games consoles! The immediate solution was to shuffle stuff about, then put up a shelf – a wee shrine to my retro-gaming habit.
Most of the time, however, most of my retro-gaming kit had to live in the loft – which is obviously the least-good solution when time only usually allows for random and fleeting gaming sessions. But even when I could get it down, having old monitors perched on the edge of a small desk, or worse still, underneath it, wasn’t exactly ideal.
While the room wasn’t big, the more I sat in it, and the more I thought about it – which was a lot – the more I came to realise just how much of the available space was wasted. Of course, cramming every square inch of any room with furniture and shelves is never really a good look – either aesthetically, or in terms of health and saftey. In the words of design guru Mies van der Rohe, less is (usually) more!
Ogam’s razor here – the simplest solution – would have been to hit up IKEA for a more tightly-configured set of furniture – maybe swapping out the BILLY bookcases for some lower, desk-height units, perhaps with a worktop/desk over the top, and some wall-units to match. But try as I might, I could never quite get things to fill the space the way I wanted them to. There was always a gap here, or a window sill or power-point in the way there. In the end, it was obvious that I was going to have to get creative, any maybe even make some cabinets myself. But then COVID happened.
Compared to many people, our lockdown experience was mild. None of us got ill, and as we live very close to the sea and a couple of quiet beaches, we didn’t have to stay couped up in the house if we didn’t want too. It was tough not being able to see family and friends in person, of course. But I was kept busy with work. Now, don’t get me wrong, being able to work from home was a godsend, but the flimsy fixtures in my home office weren’t really up to extended hours of abuse that followed.
First thing to go was my office chair, then the ceiling light, then my PC, then the flooring started to split. With the ceiling already stained from an earlier plumbing issue, things were starting to look more than a touch shabby. The room was also filling up with work junk. I bought another small bookcase and fitted with casters, so I could move it to access the shelves behind. But it wasn’t big enough to keep everything tidy. Basically, it was no longer a pleasant space to be stuck in. So, when things started to go back to normal, I knew I had to do something about it.
Now, I’d seen a lot of YouTube videos and blogposts where folks had used scaffolding planks to fit out their games rooms – to impressive effect. But as good as these looked as shelving, I was still going to need closed cupboard space, and I wasn’t quite sure how best to combine the two. Besides, at the time I was looking, scaffolding boards seemed to be selling at quite a premium. I also looked into laminated kitchen worktops, thinking I could get some cabinets to match, and cut them down to size if necessary. The problem there would have been cutting and joining the worktops without making a mess of it. So, I decided to go back to solid wood, which I felt I had a better chance of working well, and making it look at least half-decent.
While trawling through eBay, I’d seen some really nice-looking oak worktops. The smaller ones weren’t really cost-effective for this kind of project. But it turned out that if you bought several 4 m lengths, the discounts on offer made for a much more reasonable price-per-metre.
So, I went back through my design ideas and decided on 28 mm board for the selving, and 40 mm board, 64 cm deep, for a workbench wrapping round two walls. With careful measuring, there would also be enough offcuts to make an under-desk PC-storage system, and line the exposed sides of the shelves, and lower cabinets with wood.
For the cabinets themselves, I decided to go with IKEA METOD kitchen units. While there were none that would fit neatly under a desk-height worktop, the plan was to cut them down to size, and fit them with custom doors sourced from elsewhere on the web.
The work begin in November 2021. Clearing out the room was perhaps the worst part of the job. It took three or four evenings to get everything off the shelves, out the cupboards, securely packed into boxes, and moved elsewhere in the house. The worktops arrived soon afterwards, unsealed but wrapped in plastic. Miraculously, they were delivered on a day when I was actually at home, and it wasn’t raining!
As it was wintertime, the boards would have to live in the house for a few weeks until I was ready to process them – flat on the floor, of course, so they could acclimatise without warping. However, lifting and manouevering 4 m slabs of 40 mm oak worktops without smashing a door, denting furniture, or putting your back out is, let’s just say, ‘challenging’. Luckily, I’d already borrowed a circular saw, and with the help of some clamps and a straight edge, was able to cut them down to a more managable size.
Before I could get any of the fun stuff done, I had to prepare the room. Most of the furniture went to friends, neighbours or Gumtree, but the messy flooring was ripped up and thrown with glee into the tip. With the floor clear, I decided to chase a channel across the room for some trunking to carry a new ethernet cable to the PC. I knew this would be dusty, and took precuations – like taping shut the door, opening the window, dampening down the floor with water, and wearing a mask. With hindsight, though, I’d probably have chosen a different solution for that particular problem!
With pipes and wires in place, I used some self-levelling compound to even out the worst of the dips, and minimise the scope for wear-and-tear on the new flooring. As the cabinets were going to be built-in on top of the flooring, and it would have to stay in place for a long time, I decided to push the boat out a bit here and go for something a bit more durable. Not wanting too many different kinds of wood on display, I went for an engineered oak finished, broadly similar to what I intended for the worktops. I also put some more effective insulation underneath. I’m really happy with the end result, and think it looks great, but it seems to be magnetic to hard objects and sharp edges, which have already left plenty of dings. In retrospect, I would have gone for thicker and more expensive stuff, with more oomf to withstand the day-to-day blows.
With the floor done, I moved on to the wood. While I’ve done a fair amount of bodging with CLS timber, and larch in the past, I’d never really worked with hardwood. Basically, the main thing you need to appreciate is that it’s very hard, and very difficult to cut!
Even if you have tough tools with properly sharp blades, you can’t just plough through 40 mm thick boards in one go, let alone cut a straight line – even less so, one that holds to 90 degrees.
Fortunately, I had known this in advance, and had planned my cuts so that, in almost all cases, it would be the factory-cuts you saw facing out into the room. My own shabby saw-work would be disguised by having it face back onto the walls. Nevertheless, the practicalities of doing this turned out to be even more difficult and frustrating than imagined.
Where possible, I used the spare boards as straight edges. Being heavy and tough, they were never going to flex – which is something you need to avoid at all costs when making long cuts. I also took each cut in several stages – going throught about 10 mm at a time. Even so, the slight differences in the way I was holding the saw meant the cuts were never really that smooth, and a lot of planing, sanding and swearing was needed to sort it all out.
The one saving grace here was that the walls in my house, like those in any other house – in my experience – are never perfectly smooth or plumb. So, the boards would have to be planed anyway to fit neatly in place. Another small, but annoying issue, was the realisation that the circular saws would take off a fractionally smaller amount when cutting from the left compared to the right. This made precision cuts difficult, and highlighted the importance of consistency in techinque. Looking back, I think I should have invested in a track saw for this part of the job, and perhaps used even more passes to cut through the thicker wood. Oh well, you live and learn.
With the wood cut, the next step was a final fettle to match the countours of each plank to those of its intended space, and then treatment with a sealant to stop it warping or getting stained black by water spillages. Yessir, believe it or not, plain old tap-water can leave horrible black stains on your hardwood surfaces which are very difficult to get out. The same is true for iron – never leave either in contact with your lovely new hardwood worktops!
Sealing the wood wasn’t too tricky, but as the wood was new, it did take four coats over several days. I decided to use Rustin’s ‘Danish Oil’, which looks good, and lets off a lot less, and a lot less toxic fumes than many other treatments, working it in with 240 grit wet-and-dry sandpaper for all but the top coat. The results were very nice – and even better with a liberal helping of Mr Sheen on top.
Next it was time to ‘mod’ the IKEA cabinets. I’ve done this before when fitting kitchens and the like, and having to squeeze one last cabinet into an awkward space. It’s easy enough to do in theory, but there’s an important proviso. Over the past 20 years, a lot of IKEA stuff has been cost-reduced to the point of being mostly thin air! Seriously, with their chunkier stuff in particular, what you get is a cardboard honeycomb faced with melamine. They’re sturdy enough for everyday use, but can’t be cut to size without crumpling. If you’re going to do this yourself, make sure the units are solid (wood or chipboard), or at the very least, that there are no voids in the bits you plan to cut though. Having established that, my three top tips for cutting melamine-faced chipboard with a circular saw are:
- Use a fine-toothed blade, and preferrably a new one,
- Cut with the ‘fine side’ down, that’s the bit that folks will be able to see,
- Line the parts to be cut with easily-removed masking tape. In theory, that’ll hold the melamine together and stop it chipping quite so much. In practice, it’s never quite perfect, but you can buy coloured furniture waxes to cover it up.
With the sides cut to size, I carefully drilled new holes for the fixings, put the units together, and lined the exposed edges with melamine tape. Typically (!) the floor wasn’t exactly level, so it was important I fitted the cabinets with surdy, adjustable feet. I didn’t have the clearance to use IKEA’s own parts for this, but there are plenty of other options avaible on the web. The same thing went for the kick boards. Standard offerings were too high, but some lengths of melamine-coated chipboard cut down to size easily enough.
It would be less than honest if I said that fitting the cabinets was a breeze. To give myself the best possible chance of lining things up squarely, I started by attaching some battens to the wall – at the bottom, for the cabinets to rest on, and at the top, for them to be screwed into. But even then, with nothing being plum or level, it took ages – and lots of clamping and tweaking – before I could get everything into place.
With that done, it was time to fit the worktops. Given the difficulty achieving perfectly straight edges with my limited skillset and meagre collection of tools, I decided to go for ‘butt-joints’ (fnarr-fnarr), held together with worktop clamps. This was actually, surprisingly straightforward. I’d already bought a forsner bit to drill out the holes, and used a smaller circular saw and a chisel to cut out the channels – making sure they were oiled like the other surfaces. It went together like lego.
The shelving was next. Getting the parts turned out to be a pain. As the shelves would be bearing a lot of weight, eg. my full collection of Retro Gamer magazines, I wanted sturdy brackets. Finding the right size in the right colour was difficult enough, bet even when I thought I had, I went through several shipments, from several different suppliers, which turned out to be way off the advertised dimensions, or cast at angles so far off 90 degrees, it was actually quite funny.
However, we got there in the end, and I was eventually able to source and fit a combination of lipped brackets, angle brackets and jointing plates to hold everything square and secure. After fitting the shelves, I also got to try out some exciting new carpentry chops – putting in my first ever ‘dado joint’! I used it to attach an end-piece to the main run of shelves, making them look more like a cabinet than a jumble of planks. I was chuffed with the result.
By now, the stacks of boxes strewn around the house were becoming a wee bit… contentious. So I moved most of the stuff back into the study. At this stage, there weren’t many big jobs left to do. I’d painted the walls, fixed the ceiling, tarted up the window and door with some high sheen gloss, and new handles, and added a ‘few’ more points to the ring circuit. I also decided to swap out the old radiator for a slimmer model. It had pretty much the same BTU output, but its slimline profile sat a lot closer to the wall, and really opened up the back of the room.
Next on the list, was cabinet doors. Loads of time was wasted mulling over styles, colours and handles, but with this procrastination came the realisation that I wouldn’t be able to cut IKEA-type doors to size without leaving visible and ugly scars. Luckily, there are a few companies on the web that make these things to measure. Moreover, they’ll do them with built in handles, which I reckon gives them a cleaner, more modern aesthetic. If you’re prepared to do a bit of fettling, you can even fit them with IKEA’s soft-close hinges. At £2.79 a pair, that went some way to balancing out the extravagence of the doors.
Of course, with the big jobs done, the temptation was to kick back and relax, but as with all projects of this type, the list of minor snags was enormous. So, I persevered, fitting some new blinds and LED strip-lights while I was at it. While the top strip shone out distractingly at eye-level, a hasty trip to B&Q, and the purchase of some angled oak-moulding let me knock out a matching shroud.
Its been nearly a year since I finished the project now. I enjoyed doing it. Of course, there were frustrations along the way. But I feel that I learned a lot about woodwork and ‘room-installation’ in the process. If I was to do it again, I’m sure I could do it better and quicker. But hopefully that won’t be on the cards for quite a few years. Besides, I’m not sure my wife would let me, even if I wanted too! According to my son, the study is now the ‘nicest room in the house’. And he’s probably not wrong. My refurbishment skills, it seems will be tied up elsewhere in the house for the forseeable future.
Anyway, here’s what the business-end of the room looks like now. Have you done anything similar? Have you got any tips or advice to share? Feel free to chime in with a comment below.
Arcade Odysseus 