DIY Music Studio Desk - Build A Desk In 10 Steps [+ Free Plans]

Intro all right guys what's up so in today's video we're going to be doing another diy studio video so in case you guys haven't realized in my first video to kind of my videos now my studio changed a lot and it's just my desk i'm in the same room i repositioned everything um repositioned my speakers my acoustic panels and of course all of my gear is now on my desk and my computer and stuff is underneath the desk so i did some slight adjustments but the main thing that is different is the desk so i built a new desk i wanted to have a studio desk that had rack space accessible from the sweet spot and i just wanted to have a little bit of a wider surface that's also um not an angled desk for an l-shaped desk so that i could fit everything on the same kind of table and be at the right distance from my speakers no matter what i'm doing when i'm working so i built myself a desk i kind of found some other plans online slash found another guy's video um and i kind of had to decipher the plans modify them a little bit for the materials that i was able to find and i just found the video a little bit long for no reason so i'm going to be doing my own video of my desk how i decided to build things i've redrawn the plans completely for you guys so i hope that all of the measurements are perfectly clear they're going to be downloadable for you guys um because that was another thing with the last guy's plans is that you kind of just have to hand copy them with you know looking at the drawing of the video so i've drawn up the plans i've drafted the plans super super easy i'll flash it over on the screen right now um just kind of showing you the cuts you need to make the material that we'll go over it's not essential you can kind of mix and match whatever you want to do if you think something would be better or if something's not available to you but the basic um you know list of all the parts and every pieces that i bought um cost me about five to i'd say six hundred and fifty dollars canadian you save a lot of money because any of the studio desks available on the market that have those criteria are you know starting at maybe a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars plus shipping importing and it just gets ridiculous from there for a desk so i built one myself i took videos of me building it the whole way um we'll start way back at the beginning um after i flash those plans we'll start at the beginning and the first step is going to be obviously cutting out the two side panel pieces um and then it's just a simple thing we're gonna build the two side racks here and then on top of the side rack um you just lay this countertop surface on here so let's get right into it you'll see how easy it is if you have basic diy or you know kind of handyman knowledge so it's really really easy you're just gonna have a couple cuts to do um the better you are at this kind of stuff the nicer the finishing will be of course so i think anybody will be able to do it with these plans and if you were planning on getting a new studio desk i hope this video will help you or inspire you to do it yourself and maybe get you a desk faster because it's a lot less expensive so if you guys plan on using these plans or if you find the video helpful and you were just curious on building your own studio desk please just drop me a like and subscribe it helps me out a lot and i'll be doing a lot more diy stuff you'll see in the next couple days i'll have another video coming of the next diy project along with some more tutorials let's get right into the video and build this desk Cutting Pieces following along with the plans you can see that we're going to use three quarter inch mdf we're going to cut squares of 35.5 inches by 35.5 inches and then you can see in step two that we have to make all of these cuts once you make those cuts on one piece you can use this piece uh as a template to create the next three you're going to want to make the first one as accurate as possible and then use that and cut along the lines that you trace so that your piece is the same size once you have all four pieces cut out this is where you're gonna add the cross pieces using two by three so we need to have an inner spacing of 90 a little over like a 19 and 1 16 inches inner measurement so that we can put 19 inch rack mount gear so those pieces are exactly 19 and 1 16 and we're gonna cut out three cross supports using two by three per rack Installing Supports this is going to give us the stability that we need and it's going to also hold the pieces together after you've installed the 2x3 we're going to use 1x8 which is this thin little wood piece that you're going to see now as just a kind of back support which is also going to help keep it straight and i didn't use two by three here just for um the look of it i wanted it to be kind of like a back panel piece that stops you from being able to see through the rack completely and it's also going to provide the same level of support and hold the two sides together so we're just putting two screws for each one of these supports for each type and we're using um pretty long screws i believe there were two or even three inch screws because we have a three quarter of an inch material we want to go through that material and then into the actual support by you know a good amount so you're going to want to repeat this process to create your two side racks and once those are done you're going to have pretty much the supports for your actual desktop finished so here i am just measuring the inner the inner width to make sure that it's actually 19 19 inches or 19 inches and 1 16. and now here i have a bamboo countertop so you can see in the plans i mark off the size of the or in the the parts list that i'll provide you'll see the size of the bamboo countertop that i bought and to make it fit with our side racks we need to cut out the two little back squares so that we get the inner section that runs along the sides of our racks so take your time cutting it it's very very thick you're going to want as Cutting Bamboo straight of a cut as possible measure several times cut once because this is the most expensive piece so you want to make sure everything is nice and straight and perfectly measured once you cut out you can see we cut out the two um back pieces and now it slots perfectly and the two pieces that were sticking out in the front are providing the support for the actual desktop that your elbows will be sitting on Sand MDF in this step i'm sanding the mdf because we're going to apply some primer and some paint to change the color of the board so you're going to want to repeat the sanding as using rough rougher sandpaper to finer grit sandpaper and then once that's done you're going to use a dry piece of cloth or paper towel to wipe away all of the residue and the little sanded particles that you need to get off before applying your primer and then your paint you want to make sure that all of this is off and loose from the side of your board so that the paint will stick here i'm using primer using an acrylic based primer you need to be careful not to apply too too much at once because mdf will puff up if it gets too wet so apply it really really thin and do several coats i think i did two or three coats of primer and then it dries really really fast so you can do this within you know the span of maybe an hour give it give it a good 15 minutes to dry 20 minutes just be sure and then you can go ahead and apply another layer of primer right right away Black Paint after that i took it out and i applied a black paint to it i used a Sanding black i believe it was an oil-based paint um i applied two or three coats of that i sanded any imperfections on the first and second layer and then the third layer was just to get it as nice as possible Staining so now we're gonna look at this desktop piece that we've cut out it's made of bamboo so we're gonna use a wood i'm using a gel wood wood gel stainer and i decided to go with black to match the side so i'm giving it a good stir and then you're going to want to pour some of the gel out onto your surface and use a brand new rag kind of cloth that's dry and you're going to spread around this gel stain as much as possible you don't want to have any excess you want it to be kind of on the dry side as you're getting to the end of it and if you're missing any don't be shy you can dry you can grab some more it's just um you're going to repeat this process a couple times so don't worry if it's not too dark after the first one this is black stain and this is after two or three layers of stain here you can see in the video it's not really black it's still kind of a very dark brown but that's the result you're gonna get even using a black stain i guess unless you do Clear Coat several several coats more so that's the final stain result now this is a clip i've started to apply clear coat just as a protective layer on top of my stain so you can see it's got a bit of a gloss here you can see those little cloudy parts are still some uh sections that haven't fully dried yet from the clear coat so i did a little side panel which i didn't end up using i was going to use it as a monitor stand for my computer monitor but uh that little side piece that you saw so that is the desktop Side Rack fully stained and the side piece is fully painted just assembled sitting on top of each other now we're gonna go to the side rack i bought some little furniture feet here which it says on the back uh just read what size pilot hole you need and in my case it was one inch deep uh i can't remember the exact measurement for the the width of the the drill bit but i'm gonna drill four holes with my drill bit taped off at one inch depth and then i'm gonna hammer in the little plastic threading for the feet and i'll screw in these little felt uh furniture feet this also helps you to level out if your cuts weren't perfectly straight you'll be able to level out your desk um a little bit more by screwing in and you know changing the height of the furniture feet on on each of these uh side racks so here i'm just finishing hammering it in i put the cab the hammer down here is the actual furniture feat which is the metal screw part on it it screws right into this and your pilot hole should be deep enough that it goes all the way to the end if you wanted to Rack Rails but in my case i'm gonna leave it out just a little bit and afterwards i adjust them to fit the um to to get the right height and the level the desk out a bit more so i bought some rails off of amazon these are 10 rack unit rails you can just buy them empty like that i bought four because i needed to fill the two rack spaces i just centered them just measuring leaving uh the same gaps i left a larger gap at the top because i didn't want a larger unit to hit the back plate there the back cross support anyways so that's about it um you can see that in the finished picture here that i kind of added a lot more screws you have to use half inch screws because your mdf is only three quarter of an inch and you don't want to push the screw through so you add them every second or third hole just to support all the weight that's going to be in your rack and that about does it for that so after this you can start to assemble your desktop your as shown like earlier in the video the desk kind of fits in you just space them out the right distance apart from each other put your desktop on top and you'll see in one of the next pictures i added these two little two by three pieces on the inner sides right there just to support the desk you can add some brackets and fix the desktop down and that's it that's finished and in the studio all right guys so that Outro about wraps up the uh diy studio desk build i hope you guys liked it i hope the plans are nice and clear um i just want to know if you guys are planning on building this uh do you guys think that it's worth it to build it yourself or do you think the ones that are in stores are a lot nicer um anyways if you guys had any modifications that you guys do or if you end up building a desk and you build the same one uh send me some pictures i'd love to see what you guys end up doing with these plans and this studio desk build um i'll see you guys in the next one i've got some more studio diy stuff coming up soon and back to the usual tutorials of course but at the moment i'm doing a little bit of diy stuff so i figured i might as well document it and post it while i'm upgrading the studio and adding some new pieces in there so i hope you guys are liking it if you are also let me know about that and i'll see you guys in the next one cheers you