Extra 20% off Local Spas, Resturants, Movie Tickets and More Up to 95% off Many Udemy Learning Courses for $10 Each Up to 80% off Electronics Clippable Coupons Pay What You Want eLearning Courses, Webservices, and more. Prices as low as $1 Extra $50 off Select Dell Desktop & Laptop PCs $699+ New T-Mobile One - Unlimited 4G Data, Talk & Txt from $40/line per month (taxes & fees included) Select All Posts By This User I got a request to do a build log for my desk, so I'll dump a couple pictures and outline what I did to make my current workstation desk, shown here. All said and done, this desk cost me just over $100, not including me having to rent the Home Depot truck because my sissy sedan could never fit this stuff in it's trunk. I could easily see you saving money by going to lumber yards or scrap collection centers for cheaper parts. So here's what I used: for the surface I purchased a solid birch door blank, 80"W x 36"D x 1.75"T -- $52 (online it says $57, odd..)

for legs, I kept it simple and got 2 basic wooden sawhorses 27" tall -- $15 x 2 = $30 I picked up 2 sanding sponges, one coarse and one extra fine -- $3 x 2 = $6 you'll want wood stain, I chose Minwax classic grey as I hope to eventually have grey be the theme in my new computer build -- $7 also get some urethane, I chose to stick with Minwax just in case their products work better together, I picked up a satin finish because I'm not a huge fan of gloss -- $7 old bowl -- free old washcloth -- priceless Now, be warned, this door blank you just purchased is HEAVY. I had an interesting time getting it up 3 flights of stairs by myself, but ended up taking my time, wrapping the ends in towels to protect them/walls from dings, and chugging a protein shake afterwards. Here's what we looked like prior to staining. So, what I did was set everything up outside, same as in the pictures, and went at everything with the coarse sanding sponge. Round off the edges your wrists are going to rest on, round off the bottoms of the sawhorses, sand off the manufacturer's stamp on the sides of the door, and even out any dings you might've accumulated (or that the door might've had when you bought it--mine had a few dings, and I took care to pick the best one).

Take a microfiber cloth and rub along the grain to get the wood dust off before you start with the finer sanding. Go over everything with the fine sander. You want that surface as smooth as you can get. You think you're done sanding? I took the whole afternoon just to sand everybody down. You don't want any loose pieces coming off, or scratching you, or ripping your clothes, or poking you in the face when you're on your back managing cables later. Go back over it with a clean microfiber cloth one more time before staining. Now that you've sanded it, you can prop that door up, resting on a towel, and stain. Always stain with the grain! For us, that most likely means sand in the long direction of the door. That's why I propped her up longways, so stain would run down along the grain and get mopped up with my towel. I used an old washcloth instead of a roller for this application so I could control bubbles better. Rollers will bubble up a little, and you don't want to have to sand between coats of stain.

I can't think of a benefit of buying a roller or a brush for this project, honestly, other than having to wash your hands a lot. Put on coat 1 to the door and to the sawhorses, and wait. You want to do this when you're expecting dry, sunny, warm weather. windows and doors fayetteville ncI live on the coastlands of Georgia, so I get that all the timepella garage door accessories After waiting, put on coat 2 (I didn't bother with 2 coats on the sawhorses. pella windows and doors salesI plan on replacing them with something nicer anyways) and wait. Now you're ready for your polyurethane. I only applied 1 coat of this, and only to the door: it didn't feel like it needed any more than the one coat.

I just applied the one coat, sanded very finely over some of the slightly bubbly areas, and called it a day. Pretty good lookin, methinks! The only real downside of this desk is that you don't get drawers or fancy cabling options (well, and having to do it yourself, but that's not a real downside imo). I might replace my sawhorses with filing cabinets (you can get those for $40 a piece at your local WalMart or Office Supply) anyways, so I wasn't too worried about it. As far as cable management goes, I picked up a pack of nail-in cable clips, like 6 for 2 bucks, and used those as guide points along the backside of the door/desk/thing. I feel no bend whatsoever when I stand dead in the middle of this desk, and I've let my 300 pound friend stand over a sawhorse and he thought it felt solid. I doubt you could say the same for prebuilt desks that would cost 4 times as much money. Plenty of room for 3 monitors I bet. CPUMotherboardGraphicsRAMIntel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz T... 

ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI S... EVGA 03G-P4-2664-KR GeForce GTX 660 3GB 192-bit... Kingston HyperX 10th Anniversary (4x4Gb) Hard DriveCoolingCoolingCoolingKingston HyperX 3K SH103S3/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA... XSPC Dual 5.25" Bay Black Reservoir - with D5 V... Magicool Extreme 120mm x 30mm Slim  Black Norprene 1/2"OD CoolingMonitorKeyboardPowerEK Supremacy - Nickel  Dell 23" 1080p IBM Model M SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W ATX12V V2.3/EPS 12V V2.... CaseMouseMouse PadAudioSilverStone Temjin Series TJ08B-E Black Aluminu... Razer Deathadder Xtrac Ripper XXL Ininity Primus P163 AudioAudioAudioOtherIninity Primus P163 Some old Yamaha 5.1 speaker with no HDMI support The mediocre 8" sub that came with the Yamaha r... Door desk View allDoor desk View allDown the hall, your 10-year-old practices saxophone. In the garage, your husband fires up his table saw. The racket has the artwork on the walls jiggling.Wouldn’t it be great if you could muffle all that noise?

By soundproofing your walls, you’ll gain peace and quiet, and restore a little sanity to your household.To quiet household noise, you’ll need to reduce vibrations, plug sound leaks, and absorb sounds.Deadening those vibrations is best done with heavy, dense materials that stop noise in its tracks.When it comes to heavy, brick and stone are great but impractical for retrofitting your interior walls. The easiest strategy is to add a second layer of drywall to build up a thick, sound-deadening barrier.You don’t have to add drywall everywhere — you can isolate the noisy room (kid’s saxophone) or the quiet room (your reading nook).You’ll have to refinish and repaint your new drywall, and probably extend electrical outlets and switch boxes, but those are relatively easy and inexpensive DIY projects. As an extra defense, separate the two layers of drywall with 3/8-inch-thick beads of acoustical caulk ($9-$20 for 28-oz. tube). The caulk deadens vibrations that try to travel from one layer of drywall to the other.

Made especially for noise control, mass-loaded vinyl (MLV) is a flexible material that comes in 4-foot-wide rolls. It’s made to hang on walls or install on floors to help deaden sounds. Sandwich it between layers of drywall to greatly reduce sound transmission through walls.A 15-foot-long roll of 1/8-inch-thick MLV (60 sq. ft.) is $80-$110. It’s heavy, so if you buy it online, expect to pay another $40-$50 for shipping.“Sound is like water,” says Josh Kernan of Westside Drywall in Hubbard, Ore., noting that anywhere water can leak through — cracks and openings — sound can get through, too.To stop leaking sound, use acoustical caulk to plug holes and gaps around:Add sweeps ($6–$14) to the bottoms of doors and weatherstripping to door frames.Acoustic panels absorb sounds before they can bounce off walls and ceilings. They’re made to improve the sound inside a room, such as a home theater, but they’re also helpful in reducing sound transmission through walls.Made of porous expanded polypropylene (PEPP), panels come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses.

Most types for home use are covered in fabrics with dozens of colors to choose from. Some manufacturers offer custom-printed fabrics that turn your sound blocking panel into a piece of wall art: Send in a digital photo, and they’ll reproduce it on your panel.Panels attach with clips or Velcro, and installation is an easy DIY job. A standard 2-by-2-foot panel is $25-$30.Adding soft items to rooms — rugs, carpets, drapes, potted plants — helps reduce vibrations and ambient noise.Related: Are Soundproof Windows Worth the Money?Sound-deadening duct wrap quiets noisy ducts and adds thermal insulation. A 4-by-30-foot roll of 1-inch-thick wrap is $50.A solid core interior door ($60–$80) absorbs sound better than a hollow-core door. Add a sweep to cut airborne sound. Soundproofing products often come with a Sound Transmission Class (STC) rating. STC is a measure of how many decibels of sound reduction a product provides. The higher the STC rating, the better. An improvement of 10 STC makes the noise seem like it’s been cut in half.