Building my gaming table

In my original post I suggested that I’d be talking about the video’s I’ve watched and the products that are inspiring my personal design and of course the design itself but when sitting down today to write part two I realised something needed to be done first, there’s an important question that I feel most sensible people would be asking. I mean Jason you talked about the table and the desk but well, are they any good? What kind of experience do you have? Is this really a smart move you could just be buying a heap of wood and have it go to waste.

I had an interest in high school with woodworking but it never went anywhere beyond your usual pencil box and wooden spoon school projects, I was alright but it was never a passion I explored after school until I saw a reason to. Id grown tired of the bed market they were mostly either crap or a waste of money or expensive and overpriced and I had this idea, for the price I pay for a decent bed I could build one surely. I mean how hard could it be? I’d been watching woodworking videos for years on youtube for the entertainment value. So the plan was set in motion.

This bed was built from cheap construction lumber, so pine, the slats themselves are made from decking, materials alone easily was the price of a new bed but the difference was because I build this myself I could build it to last, even with the cheap lumber, I’d probably break before this bed ever does. Pine is a soft wood and will show marks over time but I don’t mind that adds character over time. There were a few features I knew from the start I wanted if I was going to build this myself, some of the very much hidden and some of them a tad more obvious. The more hidden feature was that I specifically built this to break back down to make it easier to move, I didn’t want to build something that was going to break when I moved like most cheap furniture does when taken back apart. The other and more obvious feature is the shelf inside the headboard with a power point for charging phones or to power a laptop.

Now is this bed perfect? No there’s a few things I would change if I were to build it again today, to start with there’s nothing that really holds the mattress in place so it slides around, nothing dangerous but it is a tad annoying (this is also something easily fixed that I haven’t done it yet, the other thing is realistically if I were to build this again today I’d likely do it without the built in shelf, I’d 100% keep the power point/usb point because it is an amazing addition but as much as I love the shelf removing the need for a side table it’s just not comfortable to lean against when sitting up in bed reading. So if I were to do it again that would be solid and the powerpoint would instead be at the very top instead of being a mini book shelf design I’d have just had the top of the headboard as the shelf.

It was a good 12 months before the second of my two previous projects started and that as mentioned in my first post was of course the computer and hobby desk, the first and most important change in this build was moving towards hard woods instead of the soft pine of the bed, especially given the intended use, this was designed from scratch 5-6 times largely on an idea I had in my head, I wanted to be able to mount my computer monitor off the desk, free up space, it always felt like the feet of it were in the way so I wanted to give it a “false wall” because with rental properties within Australia this isn’t really something you can do easily so it made sense, again I built this to be able to take apart.

So like the previous project of course there were things I learned from this but there has also been things I have changed with the desk since it was finished around 12 months ago. After around 4-5 months I came to the decision that the false wall on the back was a bad idea, it added to the noise in my video recording and it caused an echo I couldn’t entirely counteract, so that’s now been removed and I now run two monitors and the TV has been ‘retired’ to the living room, both monitors are on a dual screen mount, actually their second as the first was a disappointing purchase.

It was also realistically a tad too short initially not by much it’s a regular size but I’d have liked it to maybe be 50mm or so taller. But I am very proud of this even today its time that was well spent and was worth the thought put into it. I feel its evidence that over planning things is not ALWAYS a bad thing (certainly can be but not always).

Here’s the funny thing, most people when they start out with woodworking start with some simple projects, a little jewellery box, a cutting board or two, something fun and hobby like but I jumped into the deep end started with a lot of what I like to call “in theory” experience, having watched and enjoyed woodworking videos on youtube for so long but the proof was in the pudding, were they perfect? No but they didn’t have to be, I’m not expecting this coming project to be without its flaws either but I feel I’m in a good place to start this. So where to from here, well at the time of writing it’s the 31/05/2022, so I’m still a few weeks away from the deadline of starting that I set myself. However the plan is to start buying the wood itself next week if I can.

And that’s where I am going to leave you for today, in my next post I will finally start sharing the sources of research I’ve been doing, several videos from creators I enjoyed, some that directly inspired my design and some that just inspired the decision to actually commit to building my own instead of just thinking about it. So in the next post you will find a series of videos from people I wanted to give credit to and links to products that I felt also deserve credit. Make no mistake, there are some very very good products available to fulfil this desire, but they’re outside of my budget.