Floating Desk Build || Building a Recording Studio

this video is sponsored by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business oh hi welcome to another video in this video i'm going to show you how i built out my entire recording booth but more specifically i'm going to show you how i did this custom floating walnut desk with inlaid brass lettering so follow along check out the video description for links to all the products i used all the different materials there's also a link down there to our patreon page if you want to get more involved in the channel get a bunch of behind the scenes access enter a contest for me to come out and build a project with you and get a bunch of coupon codes and cool stuff like that well just follow that link but for now enjoy the video just gonna kick back here in my nick's boots and look at some pictures of puppies that one looks like a lady [Music] now you've probably seen in my last couple videos that over the course of the last few months i've been working on building myself a new office space i showed you the giant built-ins that i built with keith johnson and then last time i showed you the decorative casing that i did around the interior now it's time to build out my sound booth now i've needed one of these for a long time because whether you realize it or not i've always done my voice-overs in my closet it's not even a walk-in closet just a tiny little coat closet and i shove myself in there with my computer and a microphone and it's hot and sweaty and it's time for an upgrade so for this project i want to build myself a floating walnut desk to set my computer on and then i want to do something for sound insulation on the walls so the first thing i needed to do was take some measurements so i knew exactly how big of a desk i needed to make now the concept of this desk is going to be a walnut top with three walnut drawer faces below it you know for storing candy and paper and extra batteries and paper clips and all the fun things you shove in a desk so i got myself some nice six quarter walnut and i set to work milling it down whenever i start milling lumber for any piece the first thing i do is chop it down roughly to length giving myself a little bit extra to trim down at the very end i do this because it's a lot easier to wrestle smaller boards through the jointer and planer than it is longer ones so just chop off the excess and throw it in the scrap wood pile i mean you could use it for something but let's be honest i'll probably just burn it later i mean it's just black walnut after joining a square edge on one side i take the boards over to the table saw and i cut them to the correct width i figured out that i could use three boards to get my depth that i was looking for which is going to be 22 inches deep for this walnut floating desk after i cut them to the correct width i take them over to the planer so that i get a nice smooth surface on both sides after shoving every board through the planer for a little bit i'm finally ready to haul them over to my work surface lay them out and see if they come together nicely there's one board here's two boards and finally a third board and look at that those things plop together like they were always meant to be one uniformed slab purdy because we did such a fantastic job milling these down i'm not going to put any biscuits or dominoes in between these seams i'm just going to slap them together with a little glue put some clamps on there and walk away and let nature take its course so i grabbed my squeeze bottle of glue and honing my skills from when i worked at hot dog on a stick i smeared some glue on there just like mustard on a good old coney hot dog then i set them down in between my clamps and squeeze well technically i didn't squeeze the clamps did the squeezing but i tightened the clamps so that they could squeeze making sure to put clamps both on the bottom and the top to keep the whole thing from warping up like a taco and i was ready to move on to phase two what's phase two you ask well that's gonna be building the under frame that's gonna hold our walnut desktop as well as create a space for us to put our drawers so once again it was back over to the miter saw to start milling up some wood after roughly cutting it to length i went back to the jointer i got a nice straight edge on one side after that was accomplished i went back to the table saw and once again i cut it to the correct width i think i did right around three and a half inches now i know that doesn't leave a lot of room for drawers but i didn't want the drawers to be too deep because then there's no place for you to put your knees and you kind of need to put your knees somewhere under a desk or else you're gonna have to sit to the side all awkward with your knees pointing one way and your face point the other and that's how back injuries happen the first thing i did was cut my back frame piece to length and then i carried it into my little recording room to make sure it would fit in between those walls now i wanted a nice snug fit but not so snug that i couldn't get it in place so this was just about perfect i could wiggle it in there but it wasn't too loose from left to right after i determined that this piece would work perfectly i could haul that piece inside and start working on the rest of my frame which is going to look something like this i'm going to have my back piece that goes against the wall and is anchored into studs i'm gonna have these two side pieces those are gonna be anchored into studs as well and my whole walnut top will rest on those then i'm gonna have these middle pieces now these are gonna give a little support to my walnut top in the form of kind of a cantilevered effect but they're also going to break up that underspace and allow me to have dividers for my drawers now i wanted to give these as much support as possible so i decided to half lap all these pieces into my back support piece so just using my pieces as a reference i scored a little line where i needed to carve out for a half lap then after doing the math to determine how much space i needed in between each drawer divider i cut a little scrap piece of wood that was that exact size this will allow me to line up all my half laps in the middle and i'm going to save this scrap piece and use it later just wait i'll show you when we get to that step it'll come in pretty handy so with my scrap piece determining that all my pieces are landing in the right place i scored out lines in the middle for those half laps as well then i took that back brace piece over to my miter saw to cut out my half laps now i could do this on the crosscut sled with the dado stack but they're so small i figured i'll just use the trenching feature on my miter saw and get it done in no time so a zip zap zoop and a little more zoopage and we've got our half laps cut and they look something like this and it was at this point that i realized these aren't really half laps i mean i've been calling them that but they're pretty much just a dado or the ones on the end since they're open would be a rabbit so i don't know why i've been calling them half laps they're just slots that i shove wood in there's really no laps that are being halved here anyways i test fit all my pieces into these grooves that i cut whatever the heck you want to call them to make sure they were nice and snug now there's still one thing i needed to figure out and that was how we're going to attach the top to this under frame but thankfully i've got a plan for that just wait with all my boards dry fit together in the correct orientation i marked the top on all the pieces so that i could get them lined back up in this exact same way once i had the top marked on all the pieces just with a few scribbles from the pencil i took the pieces over to the table saw and i cut a quarter inch groove a half inch down from the top why you ask well it's because i'm going to use these little z fasteners to attach the desktop to the under frame the z fasteners slide into the quarter inch groove here and then they got this little z-shaped piece and you put a screw to attach the top i like using these z fasteners because they allow for wood movement so that z fastener can flex a little bit if the top wants to move so i just continued that groove all the way around on all of my pieces and then i was ready to glue up my whole under frame and get this thing assembled so i marked out the center of each one of my dadoed and rabbeted grooves and then using a countersink bit from the back side i pre-drilled a few holes i'm going to be hooking all of my little support pieces together with screws number one for added strength and number two because i don't want to wait around for glue to dry and have to clamp the whole thing up after pre-drilling my little countersunk holes i slather some glue inside those dados and i smush in my little drawer dividers and outer support pieces once i have them firmly smushed in place and making sure they're square using some of those woodpeckers right angle clampy things i pre-drill both holes and i drive in a four inch power pro fastener wood fastener to be exact and just like that we have our under frame entirely assembled we got our groove all the way around so that we can hook the top on with the z fasteners the top will rest on the back and both sides and then the center supports will kind of act as cantilevers to support the middle even more with that done it was time to take our top out of clamps and keep the ball moving on this project so i took the clamps off of our top which was now good and dry and hooked together and i was about ready for a nap so i just climbed on up there and took a little snoozy snooze but i won't make you watch that whole part now i was pretty sure that the thickness of my walnut top was going to be plenty to support the weight of the desk but i just wanted to double check so i stretched it across a span about the size of my desk and i gave it the good old testaroo and what do you know it's pretty darn sturdy so don't have to worry about that then i just cut my desktop to length making sure that it would fit nicely in between my two walls using the festool tracksaw festool wear tools or tools not sponsored and then it was time to sand luckily i had my isotune freeze in so i could jam out while i did so i am sponsored by them there's a link in the video description and i sanded and sanded until the entire top was nice and smooth then i carried the whole top over and i set it on my under frame to make sure that it would fit the way i wanted it to and boy am i glad that i tested this before installing that under frame because guess what i'm a and i didn't take my measurements correctly and my under frame was well too big look at my face horrible defeat to setting in right now as i realize oh geez it should be under the top about an inch and a half and it's sticking proud about a quarter of an inch somewhere i messed up you see what happened is i measured from the inside to the outside and i didn't account for the thickness of my back support should have measured from the back to the front so now i'm gonna have to cut this entire thing down but it's already glued up and screwed together luckily i've got a traxxa so i just awkwardly clamped a track onto each one of these things and a zip zap zoop i just cut them down i'm not sure a track saw was intended to be used in this manner but i gotta tell you it sure made it easy to trim this thing down a little bit and in no time we were back on track track saw joke then i set my top back on the under frame and what do you know now the frame sits back under the top a good inch and a half now why does it need to do this because we need room for our drawer faces to sit underneath there and still have a little reveal on the top so we should be good to go i went ahead and slathered some finish on my top as well as that under frame to get them all done and out of the way so i could move on to the next steps to finish the tops i'm just using a little rubio monocoat pure i was going to use odie's oil but i'm not a communist if you know you know and in no time that walnut was looking purty all oiled up like the gulf of mexico after bp's been there it's been long enough that i could make that joke right i mean that's not too inappropriate can't say it's too soon that was years ago anyways my point is i got all my pieces oiled now it was time to install them in my sound booth so i went in i measured the height that i wanted my desk to land at i drew a line on the wall now this is going to be the top of my under frame and then i used a level just to continue that line around and make sure everything was well level hence the reason i'm using a level once i had my landing zone all marked out i used a stud finder just to mark where all my studs were so i would know exactly where i needed to land screws to anchor this thing firmly in place between those two walls then it was time to carry this thing in now normally i would be very cautious about not dinging up my drywall but i'm actually going to be covering up all the drywall with sound dampening tiles so i really didn't care if i scratched up my drywall or not which was kind of refreshing because i could just bang and pound and pound and bang until i got this thing in place and well the drywall was a little bit of a mess but who cares then i just pre-drilled with a countersink bit again and sank in some screws i think i put like eight screws in total and i will say that's probably a little overkill you probably only need like four but it's not going anywhere i can say that for certain and i was surprised these middle supports are actually pretty stout just with those screws on the back now you would think the next natural step would be to just put the top on that frame but for some reason i abandoned that and started working on drawer faces so i guess we're doing this now now i wanted to do the drawer faces out of one solid piece so i could do grain matched fronts all the way across so i picked out a piece of walnut that was going to be wide enough and long enough and i roughly cut it to length and then you guessed it back over to the jointer seems like i always have to go through this process every time i want to build something you gotta join it you gotta plane it you gotta run it through the table saw it gets a little exhausting but it's just one of those necessary steps i guess once i had the board all milled up and looking pretty i went back to the table saw and i cut it to width remember our under frame is about three and a half inches so i cut this board to about three and oh five eighths just so i had a little bit of an overhang on the bottom with my board all milled down and the correct width i went over to the miter saw and i cut it to the exact length to fit perfectly in between those two walls now you might be saying well when you cut it down into the individual drawer pieces aren't you gonna lose some material well that's what i'm accounting for for the reveals in between my drawers so just don't worry it'll all work out in the end next i lightly sanded it so it was more pleasing to the touch you know didn't want to get splinters and then it was time to start cutting it up into its individual parts and pieces for my drawer faces now i'm going to cut three drawer faces but i'm also going to cut two little tabs one on either side of the desk this is going to make it so that the drawers don't start right up against the wall and scrape the wall or run into the door trim it's going to bring the drawers in a little bit from the outside so i mark out for those two tabs and i label each one with a piece of tape i want to make sure to label all my parts and pieces in this process so that i can get everything put back together and the grain will match so after marking out for my little tabs on either side i take the piece back over to my miter saw and i cut those pieces off making sure to cut on the inside of the line so they are the correct width first i cut one very carefully and set it aside and save it then i flip the whole board around and i cut the tab off of the other side guess i didn't flip the board around i just kind of slid the board through again making sure to cut on the inside of the line zip zap just like that now i got my two little tabs one for either end and if you have no clue what i'm talking about don't worry you'll understand later next i take the rest of my board and i measure it out and do a little math to divide it into thirds there goes my tape measure once i figure out the length of each individual drawer piece i mark out the length and then using a piece of tape i mark each piece with a number again so that i can get them back into that correct orientation and we can make sure that that grain continues to match on all of my drawer faces then i go over to my miter saw and this time i'm going to cut directly on the line this way i'll have a perfect eighth inch gap in between each drawer face because the saw blade's an eighth inch thick and i'm removing that material in between each drawer face if that makes sense then i take all my pieces back over to the table and i lay them out in the correct order and just make sure i did everything right and the grain is still matching up and it looks the way that it should which it does three drawers in the middle and two little tabs on the outside and then i had this spur of the moment idea to jazz up the drawer faces a little bit with some inlaid brass epoxy so i got out my shaper origin i designed a little bourbon a little moth and a little moth logo one for each drawer face and using my robot cnc which is the shaper origin i started carving out for my little inlaid epoxy pores inlaid epoxy pores i know what you're thinking who are you and what have you done with jason don't you hate epoxy and it's true normally i do hate epoxy but that's more specific to river tables and you know ugly things like that i thought some inlaid brass epoxy would actually look pretty cool and i got the shaper so i decided to go for it a decision i might live to regret just wait and you'll see what i'm talking about but with all of my lettering and logo carved out i grabbed some total boat high performance epoxy and i started mixing it together first i just mixed the two parts of epoxy and then to give it the look of inlaid brass i added some straight brass powder this isn't hard to come by i just ordered it on amazon and it was prime so it came the next day and i just mixed a boatload total boat joke of the brass powder into the epoxy and one little scoop of gold pigment just to keep it from being too green sometimes the brass powder wants to make it look kind of green and then using a syringe i started filling in all of my lettering very carefully not to make too big of a mess this is actually kind of fun i felt like a doctor in some weird back alley clinic that people come to me when they get like gunshots and they don't want to go to the real hospital and apparently i inject them with epoxy i'm a horrible doctor anyways i squirted my brass epoxy in all the various holes and i used a torch to get rid of all the bubbles then because it was going to take a while for this epoxy to dry i moved on to something else and that was installing the desktop on top of my under frame in the office space so i carried the desktop in and very carefully i squeezed it between those two walls and bumped the camera apparently but i gave it a little shimmy i gave it a little shake and i slid that thing into place and it fit perfectly now all i had to do was secure it to that under underbase with my little z fasteners now remember when i cut this little spacer piece when i was aligning my brace pieces on the under frame and i said i'm going to save this and use it later well by squeezing it in the front i can ensure that all of my little drawer dividers are evenly spaced so i just squeeze it in one attach the top and then move on down squeeze it in the other one attach the top down there and i know all my little divided spaces are even and then i gave it the good old shake test it's where i sit on top of it and shake like i'm in a jeep on a dirt road and it is pretty darn secure now let's go learn about a mistake i made with my brass epoxy you see the thing when you add brass powder to epoxy is the brass is pretty heavy so as it dries all the concentrated brass likes to soak down to the bottom of your pore so every time i sent it through the drum sander the brass got a little brighter and a little more vivid and i kept telling myself ooh just one more pass just one more pass well i took one pass too many and i did something really really stupid i wasn't keeping track of how much material i was taking off and i sanded all the way through my brass epoxy down to the walnut underneath and it looked like this kind of like a moth that my seven-year-old drew now i could play this off and say hey this is intentional it's weathered it's aged but between you and me i just really messed up the letters were pretty bad too in some spots that just completely got rid of the brass all together now i could redo this entire thing and if i was building this for a client hands down i would just start over and build new drawer faces but i'm not building this for a client i'm building it for myself and at the end of the day i kind of like the idea of leaving a mistake front and center right where i'm going to sit and work each and every day it's going to be a nice reminder that i still make mistakes i'm still learning and i can still improve at least that's what i'm telling myself when in all honesty i'm just being lazy and i don't want to redo it and there's nothing wrong with that so get off my back i've gotten ugly inlaid brass epoxy desk front but the brass epoxy is pretty cool total boat baby so after finishing my drawer fronts with a little rubio monocoat i needed time for those to dry so while i waited for those to dry i was going to start working on the sound dampening tiles on the wall in my little office now a lot of sound dampening tiles look pretty stock and kind of ugly but i found these felt ones on amazon and they actually look pretty snazzy and they're super easy to install you just peel off the back and they got this built-in adhesive and you just stick them to the wall and you can just cut them with a razor blade or a pair of scissors when you need to make cuts to fit around outlets and the such so i started working my way around the room when i got to the desk before i did my felt tiles around the desk i needed to add these little tabs on either side that were going to be on the outside of my drawer faces so i just used a little ca glue on the outside a little wood glue on the inside i spaced it down from the top of the desk an eighth of an inch i pressed it on there and boom installed and i did the same thing over on the other side this is going to give me a good bump out from the wall for my drawers to open and avoid scraping against the wall or hitting that door trim right there with those installed i could continue with my felt panels like this one that was fun to do but it's sure satisfying when you get something to fit perfect ah yeah the felt scribe classic maybe now would be a good time to talk about another huge mistake i made on this project and that's underestimating how many felt tiles i would need to do this entire room i thought i ordered way too many and i only had enough to do two walls how did this happen well i think it started back in elementary school when i realized i wasn't good at math and the problems kind of plagued me my entire life hence the fact that i've only got enough tiles to do half of my space but amazon says they'll be here tomorrow so hopefully by the end of this build i'll have all the walls done for now i'll just keep moving the ball forward on the desk and that means installing my under mount drawer slides now these are bloom under mount drawer slides i picked these up on rockler's website now these drawer slides can be hard to find right now but rockler had them in stock so go get yourself some after installing all three of my drawer slides i took measurements directly off the slides to build my drawer boxes now these might be the skinniest drawer boxes i have ever made in my life they're only about two and three quarter inches tall so i cut a bunch of thin strips of baltic birch added a groove for my lower panel and cut up all my pieces i pre-sanded all my pieces nice and lightly and if you want a more detailed in-depth step by step of how i build drawer boxes there's a video on my youtube channel where i'll teach you all about it but for now i just glue and tack my drawer boxes together and voila one done two to go after getting all three of my drawer boxes made i added my little clips for my bloom drawer slides just screwed them on the bottom of the drawer and once those were in place i used this cool little jig i got on rockler to pre-drill my little holes on the back to lock the drawers into the slides and if i wasn't feeling bad enough already about all my mistakes the foreman stopped by and he just had to point out the fact that two of the walls were done and two of them were empty why aren't these walls done why do you have felt over here and not over there get off my back man jeez sometimes he just likes to crack the whip anyways with my drawer boxes done i clipped them into those under mount drawer slides nice and easy dare i say lemon squeezy and we are ready to install our drawer faces and finally be done with this desk i mean this desk looks like it should be easy and it should have been but for some reason man i had some issues with this one so i grabbed the world's prettiest drawer faces with the most professionally done brass epoxy inlay i clamped them in place on the front of my drawer faces making sure to space them out evenly so there was a nice 8 inch reveal in between each drawer face and once i had them all clamped securely and lined up exactly where i wanted them i opened the drawers and used a countersink bit on the inside to pre-drill some holes and then i attached each drawer face with just a little one-inch screw well not a little one-inch screw i used like three one-inch screws in each drawer face but you get the picture there's one there's two and there's three and with that my desk was complete in the next few days i managed to get more of those felt tiles in stock and i got the rest of the room fitted and it was looking pretty darn snazzy i got my computer in there and i gotta tell you it felt really good to finally come out of the closet out of the it felt good well what um and phrase that differently if i i would no longer was doing voiceovers in the closet is what i meant to say um i have a place to actually do do that now and those tiles work pretty darn good too sure mistakes were made along the way but in the end we got it done and that's what matters oh hi hey this video is sponsored by squarespace which is the website i'm currently looking at right now and our website if i do say so myself is pretty dang fly dope kraken what do kids say nowadays anyways we got a sweet website and we're not even web designers we're just able to do it ourselves on squarespace because squarespace makes it really simple and easy to have a professional looking website and you don't even really have to know what you're doing let me show you what ours looks like the thing i love about squarespace is it's completely customizable so you can make a website that's exactly what you need for your business so for us we've got our goods up here which is all of our merchandise you can buy cool hats and shirts and coffee mugs banners things like that but then you also can upload digital downloadable stuff so all of our plans are right there if you want to build some fancy furniture and then there's links to our backstage pass which is how you can support us over on patreon and get backstage access to all of our cool stuff i can view it on my computer or i can view it on my tablet and they're even mobile optimized so you can view it on your smartphone because let's be honest everybody's on their smartphone more than their computer so it's important that the website looks good on your phone you can add a shopping cart with unlimited quantities of products so you can put anything you want up there you want to sell your teeth one by one you can do that on squarespace although i don't recommend that part of selling things all right so here's what you're going to want to do when you're ready to build a smoking hot website man i'm using all the great vernacular in this one you go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you go to squarespace.com bourbon moth woodworking and you get 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain it's that easy go squarespace website boom yeah squarespace ladies and gentlemen boys and girls i hope you enjoyed that video i'm just joking this microphone's not even hooked up anyways hope you enjoyed that video boy did i make a lot of mistakes like a lot of mistakes i guess that's what happens when you rush and try and do something over the course of two days next time i'll try and slow it down a little bit and hopefully do a better job for you guys but mistakes are the best way to learn and hopefully you'll learn something remember check out the video description for links to products and patreon and my website get yourself some merch until next time gonna find those puppies again where are they pop bees oh that's a cute one [Music] whoa that one looks like a fat man

Channel: Bourbon Moth Woodworking

Views: 509,887

Keywords: diy studio desk, studio desk, recording studio, home studio, studio desk diy, desk plans, studio desk build, music studio desk, Floating Desk Build, Building a Recoding Studio, floating desk build, wooden desk, office desk, easy desk build, simple desk plans, floating desk with drawers, woodworking, diy, how to, recording room, sound proof walls, music studio design, music studio setup at home, home studio setup, home studio build, home studio design, home studio desk, yes

Id: xi3dypg4v-U

Length: 34min 45sec (2085 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 16 2022