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Message: <blockquote data-quote="beardking" data-source="post: 4029929" data-attributes="member: 31421">It took me much longer than it should have, but I finally finished building my desk for my home office.  It started life out as an old boat trailer that my mom's neighbor had sitting in his yard for far too long.  I cut that up into multiple pieces and then "welded" it back into something that resembles a base for the desk.  I put welded in quotes because I'm not sure you can really call what I do "welding."  Booger welding is actually too nice of a name for what I do.   <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😁" title="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" />  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😁" title="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" /> On top of that, I put a big slab of red oak for the desk top.  That started out as a big red oak tree on someone's property.  That was cut down and milled into slabs.  I had nothing to do with that part at all.  I found a listing on Facebook for slabs of hickory that looked really interesting, so I went to look at those.  When I got there, I realized that the slabs were too small for what I wanted to do with them.  Beside the stack of hickory was a stack of red oak that was about 36" wide by 9'-0" long and 3 1/2" thick.  THAT was big enough for what I wanted.  The person that had the hickory listed was having his brother store them for him and take care of the transaction.  Kind of unfortunate for him, the brother and I didn't have any idea what the pricing of red oak should be and I had come there to spend $120 for the hickory slab.  I offered the $120 that I brought and he accepted it and I was on my way.  Got to looking later on and found out that for that slab, I should have probably paid around $300+.  For once, my ignorance actually paid off for me.I let the slab dry for about 6 months or so.  Not because it needed it (although it did), but because I get distracted from projects very easily.  So, after about 6 months, I took the slab and had it flattened by a guy up in Tulsa.  $100 well spent.  Probably would have been worth it at twice the price.Once it was flattened, I had to sand the ever living daylights out of it and then move on to filling the cracks and holes in it.  I used epoxy to do that and that was a new experience for me.  I taped up the bottom of the slab to prevent the epoxy from just leaking through to the bottom side (mostly) and went to learning a new thing.  I mixed up the epoxy with some metallic red pigment and went to pouring.  And made a heck of a lot of work for myself.  Took me 4 days of filling the cracks and holes because it just kept leaking through to the bottom.  Finally got it all filled up to my liking and then I had to let it cure for a week so I could flatten it all again.  After getting the epoxy cleaned up and the slab sanded (again), I put 6 coats of wipe on poly on it (that took another week).  Finally, yesterday I got it moved into my office.  Of course, that was after realizing that the small changes that I made during the build were going to come back and bite me in the butt.  The base had to be brought in at just the right angle to get it in the office.  Then, I was able to realize that I had decided in the middle of everything to go from a 24" wide desk to a 30" wide desk.  Makes for a bit tighter of an area for my chair than I expected, but hopefully my next office will be bigger.  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" alt="😁" title="😁" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f601.png" />All in all, I'm pretty happy with it and something tells me it will last a really long time.[ATTACH=full]374351[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]374352[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]374353[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]374354[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

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