A working home office remodel

There was a lot of shimming and leveling to make sure everything was aligned properly at this point. My plan was to get the plywood risers all shimmed and screwed to the subfloor and then test fit all the cabinets to make sure the whole thing was level and lined up how I wanted then, to remove the cabinets and install the floor. Here is a pic with the cabinets just sitting on the risers and a printer sitting on some temporary plywood.

At this point I wanted to see what the counter top actually looked like so I brought the smaller 6' section up from the garage and used it as a temporary desk for about a week. This was the first time I had seen the counter top with the grey cabinets and the newly green walls. I was happy with the look. Now what about the floor? It to was a gray color, but darker than the cabinets.

Here is a picture of one of the two outlets in no mans land. This one was going to be the one that powered the desk and everything on it. I needed a way to get power from there through the right 18" desk cabinet to the bottom side of the desk top where I would mount a power strip. I looked at several options and decided to go with this. I ran the cord through the back of the cabinet and installed the outlet near the back of the inside face under the desk. Worked out great. this.

The floor went in. The first time I installed a wood floor I used red rosin paper as an underlayment. It's not a moisture barrier and it doesn't seem to do much of anything, but it is how I do it. I've used it for at lest 6 different flooring projects now.

Here you can see the plywood risers for the left desk cabinet. The flooring extends about 1/2" under the cabinet faces with 1/2" expansion gap to the plywood risers. The cabinets sit on the risers and are proud of the floor by 1/16".

Here the risers are more visible. The blue tape represents the finished edges of the cabinets.

Floor is in and cabinets set back in place to test fit to make sure everything is still level and plumb.

T.J. wrote: The floor is a floating install and I was wary about installing it in the entire room and them placing the cabinets on top of it since that would impede the floatiness of the floor and I didn't want to lock it in and risk it buckling. The internet told me it was either not an issue at all or could be a real issue. In the end, I figured it would probably be ok to place the cabinets on the floor, but didn't want to risk having them buckle or anything like that. I also did not want to have to install quarter round around my cabinets to cover the expansion gap. This was a bit of a head scratcher. I ended up installing ply wood pieces to the subfloor that were shimmed to be level and about 1/16" higher than the height that the finished floor was going to be. Where the cabinets had a finsihed face (fronts and exposed ends) I made some plywood pieces that I glued to the cabinet bottoms so they could rest on the new pieces and allow the flooring to extend under the finished edges without the cabinets actually resting on the floor. Read about it on this old house as an option and it worked out great.

I faced the same quandary with my kitchen - my floor was nailed down, but the expansion gap was still required. My execution wasn't great, so now I have to shim the toe-kick out on one wall of cabinets. No big deal, but that is how it goes.

So fun to read your progress here and see our shared struggles!

Since, this thread is not of much interest to most, and I have lots of stuff to do on other projects, I will try to speed this up and get to the end.

After the cabinets were in, I installed baseboard under the desk and at the ends of my cabinets. I installed some scribe board in matching grey along the bottom faces of the cabinets for trim and installed white quarter round around the rest of the room perimeter.

I worked out the hinged lid idea with a mockup made of scrap wood, then modified the counter top for the hinges and attached the hinged counter to the wall. I had to do this before the other counter tops were in place so I could access the hinges to get the screws in. Here is the center counter's bottom surface showing the future hinge locations.

Don't skip too much of the good stuff.

T.J. wrote: Here is a picture of one of the two outlets in no mans land. This one was going to be the one that powered the desk and everything on it. I needed a way to get power from there through the right 18" desk cabinet to the bottom side of the desk top where I would mount a power strip. I looked at several options and decided to go with this. I ran the cord through the back of the cabinet and installed the outlet near the back of the inside face under the desk. Worked out great. this.

The junction box I hid behind my range hood is the same issue you had here: NEC says it has to be accessible after the wall is closed in, but I don't want to look at it. Good solution here.

Regarding the Salt and Pepper outlets, THANK YOU so much for posting this - it was a great reminder that I need to get off my keister and find an outlet option to mount in the panel under the bar of my island. Outlets are ugly, so I want something that doesn't stand out so much. Nice choice.

Once that counter was installed, I used it as a guide to mark and cut the adjoining two pieces so the mitered angle would line up just right. I used a laser level to try to get it all aligned the way I wanted before marking and cutting. I put the counters to be cut on spacers so they laid on top of the hinged piece. Protected the finish with painters tape.

All was going well, until that bulge in my wall that I chose to now fix that I discussed back in the floating shelf section came back to haunt me.

It was clear that I would either need to fix the wall which I had already painted and cuy my shelf abnove to conform to or scribe the rear of my butcherblock to match the wall.

Here is a before and after shot: Since this is not a kitchen and I am not worried about liquids or anything I did not caulk along the counter to wall seem.

T.J. wrote: Since, this thread is not of much interest to most, and I have lots of stuff to do on other projects, I will try to speed this up and get to the end.

Don't leave anything out! Sure there aren't a lot of people posting in your office or my kitchen thread, but remember there are always a lot of people who read and don't respond! My build thread is more for me than anything. I forget all the details of what I've done to get this far, so it is fun to go back and see the whole thing.

You've already given me a number of great ideas, so thank you for sharing here!

Here is the right counter cut and in place although not actually attached to the cabinets. Moving these counter tops around was the one part of the job I could've used another pair of hands. The 8' sections were fairly heavy, but not too heavy for me to carry. It was more of an issue of having to be really careful picking them up, getting them in and out of the room to where I cut them (outside of a small deck off my master bathroom) or to where I finished them (sawhorses set up in my master bedroom). Getting these from my garage up two flights of stairs was the hardest part and once they were up stairs I was determined to not bring them back down. The smaller hinged counter top once cut was easy and I carried it down to the garage for its finishing.

Here is a shot of my counter cutting and sanding station on my deck. This is a shot of the hinged piece getting ready to cut the mitered edges with my circular saw. The window in the background is the window on the 45 degree wall where the hinged counter top will go.

Here is a shot of my temporary work area in my master bedroom where I did the finishing on the two longer counter tops. The Poly Whey finish I used for these has nearly no odor what so ever and my wife's bionic nose didn't complain one bit about any smell. She typically can out smell a blood hound. After watching me get these up the two flights of stairs listening to me explain how I was not going to apply the finish outdoors in direct sunlight with pollen and bugs she had no complaints of me commandeering her cozy tv watching area of our bedroom for a couple days.

The finish needed 2 hours between coats and I did two coats on the bottoms and three coats on the tops, so that took a while. While the right side counter was in the finishing process I worked on the desk portion. Got it all measured and cut in the same fashion as the right counter. Once that was finished, I turned it upside down to see how my plan for all the crap I wanted to attach to the bottom of it was going to work out. The plan was to attach a power strip/surge suppressor under the desk and plug that into my little outlet I installed in the side of the left desk base. The desk legs had to pluggeed into the power strip and their control boxes and operating switch had to mounted down there. I also purchased a key board tray that could be height and angle adjustable, but also slid away under the desk when I wanted to use the desk for actual writing or drawing and not computing. I mounted the keyboard tray track to the desk. Being a nerd, I had come up with a layout plan for these items on my Autocad model and that is pretty much how I installed it.

This was an in progress pic where I was test fitting things and trying to determine the best way to route all the damn wires and cables. Part of this plan was to have 3 holes in my desk with grommits to run cords into. I needed power to my two monitors, my Ooma office phone charging cradle and my docking station. I needed the docing station to connect to the monitors. I needed my keyboard to plug into the docking station and I needed power for my desk light.

I was constrained with cramming everything in the area between the two desk cabinets since I didn't want to create a situation where cables would get caught or crushed when the desk went up and down. The desk motors have a cable for each of them that goes to their respective control box and for those I ended up cutting little notches out of the cabinet sides to route them in. Other than that I wanted to keep modifications to the actual cabinets to a minimum.

Attaching the desk legs to the desk was tricky. The instructions say to lay the desk top on the floor upside down and put the legs in place and attach with screws. In my case the desk top plus all the crap I attached to the bottom was to heavy for me to lift up and over the cabinets to get the legs down into the cabinets by myself. I ended up sticking the desk legs in the cabinets and them powering them up so they were shorter than the cabinet height, then I put the desktop in place and connected the cords. I raised the legs and fiddled with them until I got them where I wanted and then marked the hole locations in the bottom of the desk top with a pencil. Took the counter back off put it upside down on the sawhorses and drilled my pilot holes. Put it all back and got a couple screws in connecting each desk leg to the desk top. Then I had to raise the desk up well clear of the cabinets to access the other holes. The self centering drill bit set I got at HF came in handy for a lot of things during this project and this was one of them.

Here is the desk attached to the legs and raised for the first time. I put my computer and monitors on there and spent more time than I would've liked trying to tame the mess of wires cables and cords underneath. I did manage to get the cord mess a little more organized than in that pic later on.

I knew from reading about the ergonomic aspects of standing desks that my monitors were too low. I figured I needed to raise them 4-5 inches or so. I didn't really want to block my view out the window because I like to be distracted by watching the boats go by. At first I set the monitors on packages of contractor shims I had leftover and thought it was better to have them higher both sitting and standing. I was going to spend money to get a fancy dual monitor arm, but by this time between the floor, the cabinets, the desk legs, the counter tops, etc. I really did not want to spend more money. I still had to buy drawer and cabinet pulls. So, I ended up spending $6 on six cheap doorstops at Lowes and used two pieced of scrap counter cutoff to make this: Before I was sure whether or not I could pull off the hinged counter top, I bought a few of those countertop miter bolts that are used to joint counter tops togther. I used two of them to join two pieces of scrap together to get a piece long enough for what I needed.

My windows are the crank out type of windows and the crank handles protrude a couple inches from the window casing when they are at the bottom of their rotation. When they are positioned at the top of their circle, the handles don't protrude at all. I typically do not open the windows behind my desk, but didn't want to remove the handles nor rely on them always being aligned properly or risk smashing them with the desk top going up or down, so I put a 3" wide strip of my desk top along the wall that is fixed and not part of the height adjustable desk. Because of this my monitor stand legs were in danger of interfering with my desk blotter/calendar I bought at Office Depot, so I placed the middle legs of the monitor riser back from the front edge so they are about in the center of the riser. Looks a little strange but it is sturdy and stable enough for the little weight that it on it. The butcher block weighs a lot more than my two monitors.

Here is a shot that shows my 3" wide strip along the wall and the desk legs in their holes waiting for the desktop.

I wanted to put my big printer inside the 30" wide cabinet and went through a good bit of pain re-wiring and slightly relocating the existing outlet so it would be in that cabinet. I also built a new door for the tub access hole. The phone wires need to pass through my printer between my Ooma base unit and my cordless phone base unit to allow faxing from my giant printer. Since I've sent one fax in the past couple years, I figured it was an essential feature to retain.

This is why I wanted that printer hidden away. It is giant. I need it to print 11"x17" drawings. It would be nice to have a larger format printer to print out full sized drawings, but I don't know where I would hide that.

At this point I was smitten with the idea of a mixer lift designed for Kitchen Aid mixers. I could put the printer int he cabinet on a shelf and when I needed to use it open the cabinet doors and pull the shelf up. The printer would then be at counter top level and would drop back in place when I was finished. They even have a soft close version of the mixer lift where you just unlatch it and let it go. While trying to figure out an angle where I could drop another $180 on my project, I moved on to installing the remaining drawers. I just shoved the giant printer in the cabinet and plugged it in for the meantime as a temporary measure.

In reply to Mezzanine:

I'm leaving out some of the details, but I'll post everything that is relevant as I see it.

I may not be posting many responses, but I love this thread! Your craftsmanship and ideas are amazing!

Thanks for the feedback and compliments everyone.

The next step was to attach the drawer fronts and install the drawer pulls and cabinet knobs. I wanted cup pulls for the drawers and simple knobs for the cabinets. I went with some cheap stuff I bought from Amazon after looking at Ikea, Restoration Hardware, Lowes and Home Depot. I chose a brushed nickel finish because I like it and figured it would go well with everything else color wise.

Like pretty much everything in this project, this was the first time I installed drawer fronts and drilled holes for drawer pulls. I knew it wasn't rocket science, but was a bit concerned about messing this up and having something obviously misaligned. Instead of buying one of the many ready made templates/measuring tools for the job, I ended up making a template myself from a scrap of 1/4" luan that came from one of the cutouts in my desk base dust top. I only have 10 drawers and four cabinet doors - it's not like I had an entire kitchen to do or anything.

As usual, I watched some YouTube videos on how to install these and like most things, learned that there are about as many ways as there are people making videos.

While pondering/researching this I realized that my 2 drawer cabinet on the 45 degree section that I had planned on using as file drawers did not have any way to hang files in the drawer boxes. Looking at various hanging file frames online and at Office Depot was a bit depressing. Either they were sized so that they were not what I wanted and wouldn't make the best use of my space or the adjustable versions seemed like cheap construction or materials and not worth the money. So, I set out to make it the way I wanted it. One issue that I quickly discovered is that the drawer boxes for those two drawers measured 19"Wx21"Dx8.75"H (inside dimensions). The width and depth were what they were and there was plenty of room for letter size hanging files - all I had to decide was whether to orient them right to left or front to back. The issue was the height was less than the height of a hanging file folder, so I needed the rails to be above the top of the drawer box. I came up with several ideas that ended up mimicking the frames I chose not to buy, then I realized I was making this too hard. I didn't need the top of the rails very high above the top of the drawer box, so I went to Lowes (love that 10% military discount)(Home Depot offers it as well, but the nearest HD is about 3x farther than the nearest Lowes.) and looked at the little bin they have of metal. They had 48" long pieces of flat steel stock that were 1/8" thick and 3/4" tall. This was all I needed. I bought two of these to make four 22" long pieces and cut 3/8" deep notches in the drawer boxes and then placed the steel rails in the slots. I just used my table saw to make the slots and the width is just right where the steel can be pressed into the slot but is not loose. I ended up deciding on front to back orientation for the rails just because that direction was a little longer than if I would've run them right to left and figured the leftover dead space in the drawer would be more useful on the side than in the back.

Here is a test fitting with some files that I used to keep in a couple plastic file boxes.

I placed the files closest to my desk and left the right side open for who knows what. If I ever need to store stuff there I could make a divider to separate that part off from the hanging files, but for now I just have it as open space.

Satisfied with the file solution, it was time for drawer front installation. I ended up installing the drawer fronts like the Cabinet Joint video and their method is to use double sided foam tape to stick the drawer front to the drawer box with the drawer installed in the cabinet and closed. Make sure everything is lined up, then withdraw the drawer and screw the drawer front to the box leaving the foam tape forever sandwiched in between. This was easy to do for the most part.