The Office Desk

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Back in about 1986 I decided I was tired of doing my writing on the kitchen table. It was time to look into buying a desk. I checked ads but all the advertised desks cost more than I could afford at the time. I decided the only way I was going to get a desk was to get it from a secondhand store. So I started going to secondhand stores. I checked Goodwill, Salvation Army, and many thrift stores. All the desks I came across were either too small or too expensive. Then one day I was driving down the road in a part of town that I rarely went through when I noticed a secondhand store. I stopped. They had several desks. The one I like the most was a metal “teacher’s” desk. I didn’t have the money for it so I asked the clerk if they could hold it until my payday. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We don’t hold items. We used to, but people didn’t come back for them so we just stopped doing it.” I told the clerk I’d be back the following week when I’d have the money and left the store in hopes it would still be there when I came back. I returned to the store as promised but the desk was sold. I looked around and saw a big wooden desk. I looked it over and it appeared to be handmade. On the left side of the desk was three drawers–the right side, just legs. The desk top was five feet by two and a half feet (60 in. X 30 in. or 152.4 cm. X 76.2 cm). A sheet of glass covered to top. “Does the glass come with the top?” I asked the clerk. “Yes.” The prize was $85. “Can you come down on the prize?” I asked. The clerk thought for a minute then said, “I can come down $10.” “You can’t do any better than that?” “With the glass,” the clerk said, “I just can’t go down any more.” I looked the desk over again and decided it was worth the $75. I paid for it and told the clerk I needed to wait until my friend with a pickup could come and get it. He agreed, since I paid for it, to hold on to it for a couple of days. My friend picked the desk up a few days later. For some reason I was unable to go with him. My friend showed up in the evening with my desk. He had wrapped the sheet of glass in a blanket and put it behind the seat of his pickup so it wouldn’t get damage. The desk, itself, he loaded into the back of the pickup and tied it there. When I asked him how he got it loaded he told me the clerk had helped him. After about a week I thought it would be a great idea to have a bookshelf right on my desk. The desk was big enough to support a bookshelf and yet still have room to work on. I wanted a bookshelf where I could put all my writing books within reach so I wouldn’t have to go searching for the book I wanted. I knew a friend who did woodworking. I made up plans for the shelf and took them to my friend. Since I worked at a company that made cabinet doors I told my friend I could supply the wood. He told me he would charge $25 to make the shelf. He gave me an estimate for how much wood I needed. The company I worked for dealt mostly with three types of wood–pine, alder and oak. I didn’t want to use pine since it is a very soft wood. And oak, a hard, heavy wood–the bookshelf would weigh a ton! I decided alder was the best so that’s what I ordered. Alder is a soft wood but not as soft as pine. The wood cost me $25. So I got my bookshelf for $50. I still have my desk and bookshelf. I’m writing this on that very desk. I discovered, over the years, that my desk isn’t hard to move. I can do it by myself. Once I remove the books off the bookshelf, the bookshelf is pretty light and easy to carry. Then I found I can remove the top of the desk from the drawers and legs. Then I can always pull the drawers out and carry them separately without emptying them. I thank the guy who built the desk for using screws to attach the legs and drawers rather than glueing them to the top.