Simon Bradshaw

Surely the post should be 'New House!', you say? Well, we have one of those as well. But right now the only bit of furniture in it is an old metal desk – although that will change over the next three days, first as our new bed is delivered today, and then as we move house.

One of the things we like about New House is that it has a room that can be my Man Cave^TM, a small and slightly odd-shaped room on the top floor that wouldn't be a lot of use as a spare bedroom but which has natural light and which I can use for model-making and other hobbies. For this I needed a workdesk, and I'd assumed I'd have to get something from IKEA or a second-hand office salesroom.

But the other day attimes_bracing and I took a slightly different route through the Jewellery Quarter than usual (both Old Flat and New House are in JQ) and saw that a shop selling second-hand 'industrial' furniture and furnishings had opened up. We looked inside... and there was a desk. In fact, it's the one in the photos on the front page of the website, which was evidently done very recently.

It's what's known as a Tanker Desk, made of metal and built like, well, a tank. This one had three metal drawers (good for storing paint, glue, and other supplies), a wide, flat metal drawer (good for tools and other bits and pieces, when subdividers are added), a pull-out extra work surface, and a robust top. And it certainly wasn't going to wobble. It wasn't cheap – although it seems that such desks can be far more expensive once people restore them or sandblast and polish them – but it wasn't ludicrously more costly than something new but much flimsier and less practical would have been. My main concern was whether I'd be able to get it up three flights of stairs, the top one of which was rather narrow.

That evening I did a bit of research online, discovering various sites about the renovation of tanker desks and even a discussion forum! It became clear that the desk ought to dismantle, so yesterday I called the shop and asked the owner if I could come round and see if it came apart, on the basis that if it did I'd buy it. She agreed, so I popped over with screwdriver, socket set and a can of WD-40.

In the end it wasn't as difficult as I'd thought. Once the drawers were out, four nuts released the pedestal unit from the captive bolts that secured the desktop. Removing the side leg from the desktop involved unscrewing one of the side runners for the wide drawer and then unscrewing the hefty clips that held the leg brackets on. Broken down into parts, even our Mini had space for me to move it the short distance to New House in only two trips. Even dismantled though, I'm glad I won't have to haul it upstairs again.

Later yesterday attimes_bracing went back over to New House to put the desk together. That was rather more challenging than taking it apart, as the captive bolts are on sliding tracks (presumably to allow the pedestal to be swapped to the other side) and aligning them, given the weight of the parts, was tricky, but eventually we got the desktop back on. Getting the drawer runner fitted back was a headache, and I wished I'd taken more pictures when dismantling it; it turned out I'd got the position of a bracket wrong. Oh, and we found assorted insect cocoons inside. A good clean is definitely in order. But I now have my new hobby desk!



Given the joys of reassembly, attimes_bracing has dubbed it "Evil Minded Bastard Facking Fugly Desk" but it's in my hobby room so she doesn't have to look at it :-)

Next step after cleaning it will be to get something to protect the desktop, which although robust isn't something I want to damage further. It looks like I can get various sorts of rubber sheet cut to size fairly cheaply, so I may go for that.